Technology is supposed to be good for mankind. It makes life easier. Work more productive. More time for man to think about important things.
But even the most tuned technologists have a grave warning about the future of technology.
Steve Wozniak,
Apple co-founder and programming whiz, recently predicted that artificial intelligence's detrimental impact on the
future of humanity to warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Bill Gates
and Stephen Hawking.
"Computers
are going to take over from humans, no question," he told an Australian financial publication.
Recent technological advancements have convinced him that writer Raymond
Kurzweil – who believes machine intelligence will surpass human
intelligence within the next few decades – is onto something.
"Like
people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree
that the future is scary and very bad for people," he said. "If we build
these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they'll
think faster than us and they'll get rid of the slow humans to run
companies more efficiently."
"Will we be the gods? Will we be the family pets? Or will we be ants that get stepped on? I don't know about that …" Wozniak said.
Musk,
the CEO of Tesla, has been the most vocal about his concerns about AI,
calling it the "biggest existential threat" to mankind. He is an
investor in DeepMind and Vicarious, two AI ventures, but “it’s not from
the standpoint of actually trying to make any investment return," he said.
"I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on…nobody expects the
Spanish Inquisition,” Musk said. “But you have to be careful.”
Gates said, "I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand
why some people are not concerned," he wrote. Similarly, physicist
Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could eventually "take off on its own." It's a scenario that
doesn't bode well for our future as a species: "Humans, who are limited
by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be
superseded," he said.
In LOST, the island housed once was "cutting edge" technology and research facilities. It was Dharma that was looking for answers to the darkest questions and mysteries in science, including end-of-the-world scenarios.
There has been a debate on whether Dharma killed itself off, or whether it was the technology that it created that led to the mass destruction and purge.
The smoke monster may not have been invented by Dharma, but could have Dharma "programmed" this smoke monster in an attempt to give it human thoughts and memories in order to control it? It would seem to be a reasonable scientific inquiry. But with many science experiments, unintended consequences could happen - - - such as the smoke monster learning to mimic human behavior, including violence, anger and murder. It could have used memories as a template to shape shift into human form to feed off the emotions of other life forms. For the island was kept on edge by fear, one of the strongest human emotions. Perhaps that was the source of the smoke monster's energy.
Further, Dharma could have created the smoke monster(s) and during the Incident accidently sent them back into time to the ancient Egyptian period. For some, Jacob and MIB as smoke monsters, as well as Crazy Mother, would show an advanced being trying to shed its confusing and conflicting knowledge base of humans. And the smoke monsters did not time shift back to present Dharma - - - but lingered on the island to re-live their immortal life spans, bitter about this external prison. The game itself with human pawns could have been the reaction of smoke monsters against Dharma's research into the power of the island light.
So, Dharma failed to heed their own warning signs in creating technology which challenged time and space itself. Remember, Daniel had worked with Dharma in Michigan after his Oxford tenure. It is the time skips that give us a clue that Daniel may have set in motion all of the destructive patterns through the power to manipulate time. His return to the island was also to make amends for the horror he had created (akin to discovering the atom bomb) which was wrecking havoc on his psyche. History is littered with scientists who regretted their inventions and discoveries that were corrupted into acts of evil.
