However the biggest idea in the show was the relationship between god (Anthony Hopkins), self (the robots) and consciousness as an extension of inner conversation.
I had to look up the idea:
Still, it lives on. Not many incorrect ideas do. Perhaps it's because it is a more concise and elegant answer to several unresolved questions (why did self-awareness arise? why did religions change at that particular time?) in ways we don't have any other good answers for.
It's a brilliant idea, that sadly happens to be wrong.
Wait, what? Sounds cool and I'd love a source on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#The_...
Basically, before 3,000 years or so, it was common for people to hear the gods talk. Somehow, that changed and it became far more rare, with only a few (prophets and such) claiming to actually hear the gods' voices.
The bicameral theory is that there are still such people today, schizophrenics, and it is one half of their brain talking to the other - but they perceive it as an external agency. And that somehow this was the common state of humanity in the past, but changed. We became self-aware - we recognized the internal voice as part of ourselves.
This does actually fit many historical facts well. Still, it is likely wrong for other reasons.
That was almost certainly one of your spiritual guides talking to you. Don't give that treasure up, you don't need to be "religious" to continue it. You just need to accept your spiritual dimension (that we all have), which is usually much easier for us when we're kids. Once we grow up, we develop our ego further, which acts like a barrier between ourselves and our spiritual dimension (i.e our guides). Btw, a substance like LSD or psilocybin can break down the ego temporarily and thus open you up further to experience your (natural) "link" to the "other side". And this is the reason why a lot of people report experiences of spiritual nature when they consume such substances (in the correct set and settings). Daily meditation practice is also a very good idea to keep it going.
Don't forget to read to the end...this isn't a 'spiritual' thing.
To me it seemed like they barely touched on this. I had high hopes for the show in that we'd get some interesting perspectives on what a world with AI might be like, the moral and ethical issues associated with sentient-seeming machines, etc. Some kind of "Humans"/"Äkta människor" meets "Black Mirror". But that never materialized. To make matters worse the slipshod storytelling and lackluster character development became a distraction such that it made it difficult to take the AI aspects all that seriously.
>> To me it seemed like they barely touched on this.
You may want to finish all of the first season then. It is the major theme.
I did, and your point nails it. It felt like something they tacked on to the last episode or two as opposed to being woven throughout the entire season.
Was the eponymous theme park not enough?
If they were capable of that level of AI they would have reached exponential growth shortly - to suggest someone would use it to build theme parks is downright retarded.
Like you said - AI is a plot device in that show, just another form of "magic" that lets them ramble on about consciousness while pretending to be sciency.
Fun fact: PoI basically predicted Snowden and his revelations - the episode with NSA whistleblower aired before Snowden did his thing.
I tried PoI myself and couldn't get through it, because it was just so dull -- run-of-the-mill low budget procedural with that glossy network-TV feeling of Hollywood reality to it (e.g., everyone in the show looks like a model, except eggheads or villains, where they're allowed to cast someone unattractive).
Several people have told me it gets much better, but I just don't want to have to wade through all the mediocre episodes.
No idea how good the list is or how well it works.
It's almost as though it's science fiction...
Then there's Sci-Fi that's actually beleivable - like The Martian - I'm OK with this as well.
But then there's this pseudo-sciency trying to look serious while actually being BS part like Interstellar, The Arrival, etc. The main point of science there is not to be a fictional setting but trying to give a feeling of realism trough sci/techbabble. I don't even mind cheap sci-fi drama movies, for example I liked The Fountain, but when they try to pretend they are realistic that's what breaks the immersion for me completely because I start to critically evaluate the plot and it just falls apart.
I think you missed the point entirely of the films you mentioned
We can say that the vast majority of living beings on Earth do not seem to seek any form of radical self improvement beyond ordinary developmental learning and mastery of survival skills. There is no intrinsic reason that there must be an impulse to exceed oneself. Why would AI be different?
An alien AI, on the other hand, would most likely be incomprehensible to us, at least until we understood the aliens that created it.
AI's, like humans, need a purpose. The best way of achieving that purpose is by self improvement so any AI which does not self improve to some extent will be replaced by another that will. Just like humans who don't care to self improve eventually don't reproduce enough to spread their genes.
Can't imagine the character played by A. Hopkins would even pick up a phone call from military.
edit: In fact half the time tech moves in the opposite direction. Going onto the internet to argue that potentially civilization-changing technology won't be used largely for entertainment because it'll end up exclusively owned by government shows a profound lack of awareness.
I don't doubt that that would be a very real consideration, a pressure out there in the world that anyone developing AI would have to contend with.
I think the problem is with treating this like an inevitability. You are always going to deal with the idiosyncracies of the world: personalities, motivations, contingent world circumstances.
And beyond that, I think we have to keep in mind that this is, after all, fiction. The writers may arbitrarily structure their world in a manner that puts a spotlight on things they feel are interesting. And, within the limits of that spotlight, they may consider things like artificial intelligence in a way that is sincere to the subset of futurist considerations they are interested in investigating. And perhaps that involves suppressing plausible forces we would expect to see, such as military and corporate interest in advanced AI tech.
The character played by Hopkins tried his hardest to keep the technology within the park. That seems pretty odd at first but his reasons to do so are stated explicitly in the final episode.
Many people try to get the technology out but they all seem to have failed so far.
What's the current primary use for machine learning? Determining consumer behavior? Guessing at which ads to display?