Geography - Should We Fear the Impending Rise of Machines and Their Effect on the Future?

Should we fear the impending rise of machines and their effect on the future?

Introduction

Dystopian novels are the extrapolation of the world’s problems combined together to create a world in which society has evolved to cope with. This is due to the oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society maintained by bureaucracy and technological control as well as other dystopian controls. Authors involve these types of control to enhance their dystopian novel so that the audience can relate to the problems that the world has today. However, it is the enhancement of the problems that interests me mostly because it creates a hypothetical solution of what the world could look like in the future depending on that one problem. For example, in the novel, “Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep,’ written by Philip K. Dick, machine intelligence is the major problem throughout the novel as the androids are so realistic that bounty hunters have to find androids that are pretending to be humans – because of the machines vast intelligence they manipulate the humans to the extent were the androids can control humans.  When I read this novel that I became fascinated by dystopian novels that revolved around the control of technology. It was these types of novels and their inclusion of technology that ultimately led me to research more about machine intelligence. Though, as I read more about machine intelligence I became increasingly worried about how machines pose a serious threat to humans. Before I read about machine intelligence I thought a dystopian world of technology controlling us would be out of the question however, as I learnt more about the advancement of machines today I realised that a dystopian world was just one of the many possibilities that machine intelligence has for us. The concerns of the advancement of machine intelligence is evermore growing and if we do not respond to our own concerns and let machine intelligence evolve itself with our help, then inevitably we will lose control over machine intelligence – a dystopian scenario. This compelling issue engrossed me to try and find out more about the topic so that I can address it myself. It was after I had read ‘I, Robot’ written by Isaac Asimov that I formulated the question, should we fear the impending rise of machine intelligence and their effect on our future?

The interest in dystopian novels has helped me written the project question because it gave knowledge about machine intelligence. However, the novels did not give me any factual information about machine intelligence thus I had to do extensive research. The research consisted of important articles and references which enveloped my personal opinion on my project title and evidently helped me come to a conclusion. All the research I did is written in the literature review which also contains a historical background of machine intelligence demonstrating the advancement of machines today helping me to interpret what the machines of the future will do whether good or bad.