THE AGE OF AI

 Artificial intelligence had come a long way since it first appeared in 1935 when Alan Turning portrayed a theoretical processing machine comprising a boundless memory and a scanner that moves to and fro through the memory, image by image, perusing what it finds and composing additional photos. 

    Turing's concept of a stored program implies that a machine can operate on and modify or improve its own program. B.J. Copeland points out that "Turing's conception is now known simply as the universal Turing machine. All modern computers are,
in essence, universal Turing machines." 

    Later, Christopher Strachey wrote the first AI program in 1951 and proposed it to Turing. He liked Strachey's idea; however, he "suggested that another exciting problem would be to make the machine simulate itself in the fashion of the interpretive trace routines developed for the Cambridge University EDSAC. 

    Strachey was attracted by this idea and temporarily put the draughts program to one side. The final trace program was some 1,000 instructions long," stated George Robert. Interestingly, Strachey had no idea that it was the most extended program ever written for the machine. 

    Now we have self-driving cars, apps for just about anything, and all the world's information at our fingertips. Artificial intelligence has offered jobs, takes care of daily tasks, and helps people "increase accuracy and precision," as said by Nikita Duggal. She further lists AI's cons: "high costs, no creativity, unemployment for people who had repetitive jobs, and no ethics."

    In the documentary, In the Age of AI, an important topic was online security. It discusses how Facebook collects your personal data and sells it to Chinese companies and hackers. This documentary is one of many sources about privacy scandals with Facebook; hundreds of articles discuss this. CNBC recently published an article about this, claiming that "the world's largest social network service allowed millions of its users' personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica" and "spurred calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts" were made. 

This leaves you wondering: is using social media worth having strangers know your personal information?