Computing and AIs

[IamLEAM1983]

- Karthian and Drifter influences are pushing for a multi-sensory Internet, an immersive experience
- local efforts to adapt aren't as fantastical as you'd think. No brain-ports to the Web yet or classic "Cyberspace Cowboys"...

Regular People
- still the same old Web pages we're used to, only now they're delivered in fancy wrap-around browsers if your screen is shaped to support it
- touchscreen have affected Web design, though. Hyperlinks are less common, replaced with site elements you can expand with a click or a gesture
- WebGL is starting to feel antiquated, so a lot of pages *do* have 3D elements. Floor plans, interactive visits, browser-based games, etc.
- some city services still have isolated cutting-edge workstations. See zoning permits and 3D, scalable maps of the city in City Planning department

Cutting-Edge Sectors
- "flat" pages are actually layered on top of a still-developing full-3D Web surrogate
- everything becomes gesture-based, with the Web being in a transitional phase.
- conservative estimates: 2050, Old Web is gone. New Web is organic, expansive, alive

- more and more, the Web seens to generate itself. Comes from all the crawlers, spiders. New protocols are driving semantic links we wouldn't have thought of
- theories are surfacing: so many people on the Web for so many years! Wouldn't this create some kind of Genius Loci drawing from *all* of Cyberspace's visitors?
- all that analysts can say is that something is taking shape. Search engines are getting more precise, artificially "smarter" by the month
- Internet is becoming a mirror reflection of human life, in data form.

AIs
- generally start as research agents and data miners for companies or particulars lacking time to assemble research papers
- developed around 2015, really kicked off in 2020, troubling developments in 2023. See Grigori Tesla, researcher in human-scale neural nets
- AIs are starting to bring things back from the Web that we haven't put there. End result: computers and personal secretaries with a developing sense of beauty or artistry...
- ...or just a whole bunch of raunchy jokes. The Internet can be just as immature as it's always been, in places

- tend to depend on a specific set of microprocessors with organic elements appended to silicon core
- essentially a compressed brain emulator

- thanks to this, Tesla is pushing to introduce AIs in some of his electronic armatures. Honestly wonders what an AI would do with five senses...
- estimates suggest results would resemble a speech-enabled infant

Viruses
- developed in tandem with AIs, largely as expected by Tesla
- typically reserved for industrial espionage or concerted "cyber-wars" against Syria, Libya, Afghanistan
- only differ from AIs in how aggressive they are and in their secondary purpose. Self-replication or system overloads or hostile takeover of enemy nations' systems
- are also a cause for concern. Initiative and ambition seems to have surfaced in some viruses based on AI cores

Sentient Computers?
- is more or less inevitable. Hasn't surfaced yet, but it's only a matter of time
- program analysts already are encouraged to double-up with a Psychology major, if they don't mind going back to class..