Gloria - Prologue

Gloria

Prologue

Artifical Intelligence. Man has so often dreamed of one day being able to create an entirely artificial being. The fictional novels of our history teem with examples of robots, androids and sophisticated computers with their own personalities. Even now people are hard at work, creating AI in program form such as Cleverbot, or in robot form such as Honda's ongoing Asimo project.

In 1950, Alan Turing published his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". It was a work of both science and philosophy attempting to answer many questions about the nature of artifical intelligence. In truth, it raised as many questions as it answered. It introduced the concept of the Turing Test, whereby a human would interact, via text messaging, with both a human and an AI in an attempt to tell them apart. To date, no AI has yet passed this test. But a key question to arise from Turing's work was whether a computer needed to pass this test. Whether acting human was necessarily a sign of intelligence. Surely if the AI could both think and understand then behaving realistically might not be the ultimate goal. Many believe the ultimate goal of AI is not just to fool a human into thinking he is communicating with another human, but to create an intelligence that can learn, that can think, that can improve itself in ways it was never designed to do.
We are many years from such a breakthrough.
This story, however, ponders the question, what if?

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Additional notes:
This story does not take place in real time and as such there will be times when I provide links to web pages or pictures for illustrative purposes. These pages may contain dates that do not match the story. The photos may contain exif data that betrays their true age. I can only do so much and so I ask you to overlook any trivial matters such as these. Obviously to provide a link to a webpage with a date and time that matches the story is impossible, as you will not all be reading this at the exact same time.
After all, it's just a little fun.