Ira Sigman

Ms. Gilchrist

ENC 2315

20 April 2017

Artists Statement

Demonstrating the current state of artificial intelligence outside of the research paper

genre allowed me to give my audience a more personal understanding of the significance of my

researched topic. For instance, in my first remediated composition I show the ever-changing job

landscape in its most rattling paradigm shift in recent memory. Jobs will be created and jobs will

be destroyed. Longstanding canons of training and employment can be wiped away due to

nothing more than the right programming. Cynically, this representation of a changing world for

the working class may include a widening wealth gap, but I digress as this facet of my topic is

beyond the scope of my remediation. As support for the assertion that AI is far away from

completing this economic takeover, I administer the Turing Test to a chat-bot (TSAR 3) built on

the CLARION foundation that runs on Stanfords root access machine. This is one of the highest

functioning cognitive architectures available to even private access. TSAR will fail the Turing

Test as all modern machines will. Actions that seem simple to the audience will be infinitely

complex for the machine to handle, at least in this stage of processing. On the less technical side

of my topic I introduce the social issue of endangering others by driving when self-driving cars

have become the norm. Driving is dangerous. There is a principle in statistics known as a

micromort. This is the chance out of one million that an action will cause death over a given

period. For instance, scuba diving produces 10 micromorts per dive. Driving 230 miles produces

one micromort as compared to being driven by driverless cars which only produces one
micromort for every 3750 miles driven. This statistic among other are why I decided to

remediate into a short story which challenges the moral difficulties with allowing autonomous

cars to take the road. What set of moral standards and theories are the driving machines to

operate by? Are there circumstances in which it would be morally correct to threaten or end the

life of passengers? This question and others are addressed indirectly in my short story which

takes an instant, a millisecond, and explores the detail of what will happen in the mind of an AI,

passenger, and pedestrian.