~ c o l o s s u s ~

Colossus: The Forbin Project is not a realistic vision of singularity, it was a story of a man ascribing too much importance to his pet computer and a great illustration of why there should never be a militaristic super computer. I was amused that this supercomputer was only able to communicate using one line of text at a time; this really shows how much of a fantasy this whole idea really is.

The movie brings up an interesting point regarding development and use of technology. Just because some new innovation has been made, does that mean it should actually be applied? It seems like if people stopped worrying about making each new bit of technology available to consumers immediately, we would have much more efficient and powerful devices, however upgrades would be less frequent. There would be no harm in developing Colossus in a closed environment, however, the mistake Dr. Forbin made was releasing it into the 'wild'.

People are overzealous when considering something complete and should be more concerned with testing and improvement. This article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/24/cia_netezza/ discusses the CIA's willingness to "accept untested code in chunks" from programmers developing software for unmanned drones. "My reaction was one of stun, amazement that they want to kill people with my software that doesn't work." This is basically the same story as Colossus, the government is using untested code in production and will be sure to have unexpected results. The main difference is that the government is aware that the code might be buggy , whereas the Colossus team thought their machine was infallible.

The reason technology is both moving so fast, yet going no where at the same time is because people are unwilling to extensively test new developments, which leads to unwarranted results. The way we can can avoid the nightmare of Colossus is to take the emphasis off of releasing advancements to the public and put more emphasis on understanding them fully.