Ghosts in the machines?

As Artificial Intelligence continues to hit headlines worldwide, creating scarestories about mankind’s inadvertent creation of dangerous new forms of silicon-based life, SD TUCKER reboots his system to ask the increasingly relevant question: can computers be haunted?

Computers are often said to possess a life of their own, with them frequently crashing, wiping files and generally doing whatever they feel like doing, irrespective of their owners’ actual wishes. But, as Kier Starmer plans to make Britain an AI superpower, there are some people out there who think AI itself might well be just a cunning Satanic front for allowing age-old demons back into our unsuspecting human world in disguise (see FT447:38-43). Here are a few examples of spiritually malfunctioning operating systems which make even the ill-remembered Windows 8 seem benign by comparison. ALEXA GOES EVIL Amazon’s popular voice-activated virtual assistant device Alexa has many potential functions – performing web-searches, forecasting the weather, playing your favourite songs and, of course, spying on you in your own home for…

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Fortean Times (Digital) - 1 Issue, 455

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