Artificial Intelligence, Games, and Movies.

What is artificial intelligence? What does this have to do with video games and movies? I will try to explain it in the simplest way to show how interesting this combination of themes is.

First let’s talk about artificial intelligence, what it does and what stage it is in, so a definition would be a good starting point:

“AI allows technological systems to perceive their environment, relate to it, solve problems and act with a specific purpose. The machine receives data (already prepared or collected through its own sensors, for example, a camera), processes it and responds to it”

In other words, being able to write an algorithm in software, capable of activating a hardware to carry out a specific option, for example: play chess and make moves, write a song, make a work of art, or today, drive an auto. All these actions are at different levels of depth, in particular the agreement is that there are 4:

1. Reactive machines:

the most basic types of AI systems are purely reactive. They do not have the ability to form memories. Nor can they use past experiences on which to base current decision making. An example of this is IBM’s Deep Blu capable of beating the best chess player in the world

2. Limited memory

The Type II drives machines that can look into the past. Autonomous vehicles already do something similar. For example, they observe the speed and direction of other cars. For them to work like this, specific objects have to be identified and monitored over time.

3. Theory of mind

In psychology, this is called ‘theory of mind’. It involves the understanding that people, creatures, and objects in the world can have thoughts and emotions that affect their own behavior. This is crucial to the way we humans form societies because it allows us social interaction.

4. Self-awareness

The final step of AI development is to build systems that can form representations about themselves. Ultimately, AI researchers will have to understand not just consciousness, but also build machines that have it.

Next topic, what the videogames has to say about? Just keep this concept in mind: NPC, which is the abbreviation for Non — player character, which for example, if you played Donkey Kong on Super Nintendo, are the lizards that you killed with one jump

Those lizards that you could never use but always spawned all over the map, moved in certain directions and respawned again once the level was restarted.

Lastly, let me combine these themes and how the cinema brought this to the big screen through the Ryan Reynolds- starred film FREE GUY.

The film is about how an NPC lives his world in the game with more players in the world “free City”, our protagonist is a simple NPC who gets up, puts on the same clothes, buys the same coffee, goes to the bank, gets mugged (since it’s part of a quest) and I go through this again day after day.

At the end of this story, this NPC is able to realize his surroundings, feel and perceive himself, reaching the aforementioned level 4 artificial intelligence, with his unlimited forces, he is able to modify, create and destroy within the world of software, better known by humans like us “to live freely”.

The film reaches there, the theme is what comes after this event, and there the imagination is for everything (and I will take advantage of leaving that theme for my next post), where knowing that the machines at some point can be free, what scenarios in the real world can we expect: the tyranny of machines, the end of work? Unlimited knowledge? The elimination of humans?

We will gather 2 or 3 and we will analyze which can be the most interesting and which the most apocalyptic.