Attitudes on Artificial Intelligence and how they have changed.

     Today, people tend to view artificial intelligence as a positive technology investment towards the future; a future filled with machines that can on some level, think for themselves and help humanity progress towards greater technological advances, as well as do tasks that humans would prefer not to do. There are some who dissent, but most seem to be on the band wagon for creating robots or computers that are more independent from human involvement, but not control.

     Modern examples of negative perception of A.I. are portrayed in such movies as The Matrix and The Terminator, with more balanced views being portrayed through I, Robot, showing both the negative and positive sides to A.I. Obviously in Star Wars, the culture is shown to be ingrained with robots, though mostly as servants, and in Star Trek, the technology is still new, for androids, but is shown to be positive most of the time. In Metropolis, humans have become reliant on machines, without which society would break down into anarchy, and soon does after the machines are broken down. The fear being that society will become too used to technology doing things for them so that they forget how to do things for themselves; though this is not the main focus on Metropolis, it is an interesting aspect; a more clear picture of this would be in Star Trek: The Original Series, where there is a race of aliens that has since died out because of their reliance on technology; they eventually forgot how to operate the very machines their people had built, so they started to dwindle.

      Throughout the past, there seems to be a caution of advancing too quickly or getting used to machines, an over reliance, and to not forget how to do things for ourselves. This seems to be an attitude which is disappearing, as people rely more and more on computers and cell phones, along with other such technology. As people become more reliant on technology, other skills seem to be disappearing, such as, critical thinking, writing skills, grammatical skills, social interaction skills, quickness of mind(like mathematical skills, reading a clock, remembering something rather than having to look it up, etc.).

      All in all, technological advancement is good, however should be treated with prudence. Advancement should also not be held back because of profit; the technology for more efficient engines has been available for years now, however, because putting more advanced engines in cars would mean less money spent on gasoline and oil, and also less sales on less efficient engines, auto-companies keep technology from advancing and thus we don't have nearly the same kind of progress that was seen in the early part of the 20th Century, as compared with the early part of the 21st Century. This kind of attitude, one of profit, does not look into long term profit; when more technological advances are made, there are new things to make new profits off of, new focuses that can have equal or more money made. Another such example would be the lightbulb; the technology exists for a longer laster, better and brighter burning, more energy efficient lightbulb(thanks to Tesla), however, it is not used because it is too efficient; rather than selling these lightbulbs and looking into other areas of profit in technology, the technology is held back in order to make a short term profit, rather than sell a few advanced pieces of technology alongside things that people will need more regular replacements for. It's known as planned obsolescence.

      To delve more deeply into that topic however, would be for another post entirely, but it does affect technological advances, which is what this post is about overall. People do seem to rely on technology slightly too much, and the way modern attitudes are going, more reliance seems to be the way of the future, which if we are not careful of, we shall become a people unable to sufficiently operate without technology, which in the event of a loss of that technology, there will be few if any prepared for the fallout.