Project One: The Beginning of Project Two

         At first glance, sports and artificial intelligence hold nothing in common. Sports are an exclusively human experience, an event we have created to facilitate social interaction, common ground, and the fulfillment of emotional human and physical needs. Today, just as they have been throughout history, sports are a quintessential part of pop culture. To observe and understand what emotional needs all sports fulfill would take a lifetime of study, travel, and experience across the globe, so I decided to focus on what needs can be met by a sport that has become a much more local phenomenon, hockey. While researching the history of and interviewing people who play the sport of hockey, I discovered that the social interactions players build with one another are some of the strongest draws toward the sport.
          Looking forward to Project Two I wanted to explore something closer to me and what I one day hope to do as my life's work, programming. Artificial intelligence, while in it's infancy, poses the great possibility of becoming an artificial life form, with the capability to think, feel and react to the world around it instead of completing only the tasks that we set before it. While a chance for being a great technical marvel, this also presents a great challenge to humanity. With life forms that are engineered to think faster and do more than humans are ever capable of, what would happen if we were to lose control of these creations? What if we create beings that are so much like us that they have no wish to rule or dominate, but only to be like us, to be one of us, to live. What if AI just wanted to be human? More on this in later works.
          For now, here is the springboard for Project Two, a work entitled Let the Games Begin: Hockey and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Enjoy.

Introduction

My name is Thomas Van Conett, and I am a computer science major currently attending Delta College. This blog chronicles my work throughout my Honors Colloquy course, which I have used as an opportunity to further my research into some of my own interests, as well as a chance to better understand why others enjoy what they do. While my main interest is in computers, I also enjoy studying the human experience, the things we enjoy and why we do them. Computers today are quite good at doing the tasks they are programmed to complete, but emerging technologies are aimed at allowing them to do more than just what they are told. While the barrier between human and machine today is very clear, we may reach a point in the future where this line is blurred, or perhaps erased altogether. This blog is dedicated to learning more about this continuum, what does it mean to be human, and will that definition ever include artificial life?