Can a Disordered Mind by a Healthy Thing?

Are Video Games for Teens Amoral?

By Jim Wynn, published Jan 10, 2008
Published Content: 23  Total Views: 9,878  Favorited By: 2 CPs
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Can machines ever think and should we worry about a future where it may come to pass? Can the video games and computer programs that are marketed to be possessed of advanced artificial intelligence make moral decisions?

It was approximately 17 years ago that I had read an article by Marvin Minsky of MIT's Artificial Intelligence lab in which he pondered the ability of a computer or computer software to solve moral problems. The article was possessed of a disorder in composition that I believe betrayed the fact that MIT's A.I. lab wasn't making much headway in their quest to create a system that mimicked or actually possessed consciousness or could create solutions to moral problems. I wrote a letter to Mr Minsky detailing my perception of the problem. I believed that the human mind did work in a mathematical way that could be, to a degree, duplicated by a computer. The problem with computers duplicating higher planes of thought and reasoning like moral dilemmas was mathematical, it was however a mathematical problem that software or hardware could not tackle at that time or may ever be able to solve. AI is a featured component of video games these days, but they dynamically alter the processing of code and appear to solve basic problems not make moral decisions. On the contrary many of the video games rated for teen or mature consumers appear to be statically amoral.

Takeaways
  • From the HAL 9000 to the Terminator we are made wary of the morality of self-aware machines.
  • On the contrary the games rated for teen or mature consumers appear to be statically amoral.
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