From: Bryan Moss (bryan.moss@btinternet.com)
Date: Thu Jun 22 2000 - 11:54:19 MDT
So it's 2AM and I'm flicking through a thousand channels of
crap on satellite television and I hear, "People often ask
me if I'm some sort of Frankenstein." This grabs my
attention, so I keep watching. "Yes, I think I am." And
then, to my surprise, a name appears on the screen.
"Hugo de Garis"
Cue sensationalism. We see the Bomb, we see human skulls,
we see a post apocalyptic world, we see de Garis looking
serious next to his Brain Machine. All the while de Garis
explains how he thinks AI has more destructive potential
than nuclear weapons. (Personally I find the idea of
comparing intelligence to explosives rather disturbing.)
>From de Garis' website,
--- Discovery Channel TV Documentary on the Prospects of a Gigadeath Artilect War to Air in June 2000 I finished (mid April 2000) 3 weeks of filming with Discovery Channel in the UK, Belgium and Spain. The resulting (10 minute screen time) TV documentary will probably be called "Brain Child". It deals with the likelihood that there will be a major war over the issue of species dominance and with people like me who build increasingly intelligent artificial brains, plus the whole ethical issue of whether such machines should be built in the first place. Some of the filming sites were - Brussels' Belgium Atomium monument, Ypres Belgium WW1 military cemetery (infamous for first German gas attack), Bletchley Park UK (world's first electronic computer, Collossus which cracked the German Enigma code in WW2), CAM-Brain Machine (CBM) at L&H in Ieper Belgium, Mountains of the Moon in Spain (utterly bleak), etc. This documentary TV film should reach several hundred million people worldwide. Whether its message will be too fantastical for most people to get their minds around, or whether it will cause a storm of interest, is unpredictable right now. We will have to wait until June to see the reaction of its airing. The 3 weeks of filming which occured right in the middle of me moving house utterly exhausted me. It is likely that this 10 minute piece will be streamed and be made available on Discovery Channel's website. If so, I will link to it from the front page of my web sites. Stay tuned. http://foobar.starlab.net/~degaris/news/discovery.html --- This is all Bill Joy's fault! BM
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