Oranges born in Huainan are oranges, and those born in Huaibei are oranges; martial arts novels born in China are martial arts novels, and those born in beautiful countries are superheroes. The feelings of the people of the beautiful country for superheroes are not inconsistent with the feelings of the Chinese people for the various knights and masters in martial arts novels. It is the Chinese people's martial arts feelings that the children of the rivers and lakes fight against the sword, and the superhero feeling of the Americans is to punish the evil, help the weak and fight crime. Whether in China or the United States, the central attraction of the two cultural forms is nothing less than pleasure and hatred. In this era of accelerating inversion all the time, whether it is a student who is studying hard at the desk or a social animal who is working 9 to 5 at the desk, they all need some materials that can stimulate adrenaline, and spiritually from this bland world fleeing. This kind of happiness and enmity provides everyone with this kind of spiritual refuge, allowing everyone to escape from the ordinary life and see the possibility of another life. However, the underlying core cultures and ideas of these two cultures are very different.
The spiritual core and the most direct selling point of the American TV series "Suspect Tracking" is the story of a retired agent who becomes an urban knight and a vigilante under the blessing of a super hacker. Like the Dark Knight trilogy, there is a strong Jonathan Nolan personal aesthetic. In fact, in the context of the story of American superheroes, it can be said that Jonathan Nolan carried quite a lot of private goods in this drama. It is not difficult to see that at the beginning of the project, Nolan had a huge plan. It's a pity that the plot trend and character development of this show gradually got out of control in the back, coupled with the decline in ratings, the new project of "Westworld", etc., this show ended anticlimactic. But revisiting the show in 2021, it can still be found that Nolan has foresighted in this show to examine many social science issues on the way to the development of artificial intelligence. In the era of rapid development of big data, machine learning, and data science, how human beings should correctly use unprecedented data is a very real problem. Nolan has neatly integrated these profound issues into the development of the plot, allowing people to think about these more profound issues while watching the protagonists in New York, so that these issues can be helpful to those who do not understand technology. Ordinary people with artificial intelligence and big data are more immersive.
First of all, the development of the main plot in this play and the evolution of the male lead Harold's personal morality can actually be abstracted into a classic bystander problem, that is, the trolley problem. As a student with an engineering background, research on such issues often occurs in the study of engineering professional ethics. Everyone is familiar with the trolley problem: Suppose a trolley is about to hit a group of people, but all you need to do is turn a track wrench to make the trolley change lanes, killing another person who wouldn't otherwise. As a bystander, would you turn that wrench? What if the person who wouldn't have been hit and killed was a little kid in first grade? What if instead of turning a track wrench, you had to push another person onto the tracks to force the tram to divert? Would your answer still be the same in these cases? In this show, Harold and Reese are constantly confronted with the question: If saving a person comes at the expense of more people, is that person worth saving? What if the victim is the bad guy? What if the person being rescued is the bad guy? Should one kill one person to keep more people safe? When procedural justice cannot be enforced, is one qualified to play God to enforce consequential justice?
As the father of artificial intelligence in the show, Harold firmly believes that machines must first understand the preciousness of life before they can detect organized crime. But when I watched this drama, I often thought, if the designers of the program don't understand the preciousness of life, and they don't have a fixed value and morality, then what kind of morality will the designed intelligence have? The morality of the character Harold Finch has undergone many changes from the beginning to the end, and he has made many decisions that are not in line with the character, which is also a place that fans often complain about. Even Nolan himself said that in the later stages, the character was not well written.
In my engineering ethics class last semester I learned about two modern ethical frameworks: altruism and kantism. Altruism asserts that all decisions should be based on the greatest well-being of the greatest number of people. Kant's philosophy holds that all decisions should be based on rules that should not be violated under any circumstances. The question of altruism is how to quantify so-called "well-being"? Are some "well-being" more important than others? The question in Kant's philosophy is that if decisions based on certain rules harm others, should we still obey those rules?
In the film, Harold's initial thinking is clearly based on altruism. That's why he divided the numbers into "relevant persons" and "irrelevant persons". When he lost his best friend, his thinking changed and he believed that all life was precious. "Everyone is relevant to someone." Harold stuck to this idea and set out to save "irrelevant numbers." But are all people really worth saving? If there will be collateral damage when saving people, is the action of saving people worth it? These questions should all be questioned.
Personally, I often think, if there is such a powerful artificial intelligence as Harold made in the film, will this artificial intelligence build a new value based on the big data it has? moral principle? Would this morality be more just and selfless? After all, a person's experience and vision are always limited. As a mortal with limited experience and knowledge, how could Harold educate the morality of the omniscient and almighty God? When an intelligent body has the authority of omniscience and omnipotence, can it have a new cognition of life? Is this perception more indifferent or more enthusiastic?
Of course, as far as I know, with the current level of technology, the machine-level artificial intelligence in the film is still out of reach. The show, and the setting of Westworld, is, after all, a big thought experiment by Jonathan Nolan. Personally, I think that in my lifetime, there is no need to worry about the rise of artificial intelligence. The current mainstream artificial intelligence technology is still based on the learning and induction process of statistics and mathematics, and it is not black magic. Nevertheless, the development space of artificial intelligence is still unknown. In recent years, thanks to the development of deep learning and neural networks, disciplines such as natural language schools, machine vision, and reinforcement learning have achieved rapid success. Alpha Go's defeat of Ke Jie has attracted worldwide attention. But according to my professor, human's understanding of deep learning is still very limited, and many times it is still based on trial and error to adjust artificial intelligence models. Professor David Duvenaud of the University of Toronto commented on deep learning at this stage:
Deep learning has been somewhat like engineering before physics. Someone writes a paper and says, 'I made this bridge and it stood up!' Another guy has a paper: 'I made this bridge and it fell down—but then I added pillars, and then it stayed up.' Then pillars are a hot new thing. Someone comes up with arches, and it's like, 'Arches are great!'…
It is hard to imagine that when humans truly master machine learning and the core, the artificial intelligence developed can really have such powerful thinking and evolution capabilities as the machine in this American drama. It is also difficult to imagine how such an artificial intelligence would behave towards humans if such an artificial intelligence were to be designed. Rather than saying that the artificial intelligence in "Suspect Tracking" is Jonathan Nolan's prediction for the future of artificial intelligence, it is better to say that "Suspect Tracking" is an allegory of the development of human society. The artificial intelligence described by Jonathan Nolan may not be the final form of artificial intelligence, but it is indeed an examination of social development and human nature that is extracted from the human perspective. In my opinion, this scrutiny is too heavy and pessimistic, and overemphasizes the weakness of human nature. In the current three seasons, the shuangwen attribute of happiness and hatred has faded, and this heavy theme has appeared, resulting in a decline in ratings and a shrinking of the plot.
In 1971, Ye Wenjie sent a signal to the sun from the Hong'an base to inform the location of the Earth in the Trisolaran world, hoping that the Trisolarans could replace humans. What Ye Wenjie didn't figure out was, but what Harold figured out was that the fate of mankind is always in his own hands, not in the hands of aliens, nor in the hands of artificial intelligence. Human civilization continues to advance, and both Ye Wenjie and Harold should have more confidence in human nature. The future has come, it is not dark.
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