awakening by valmet children

awakening from Valmet Children on Vimeo.

This is an entry I made for the slide show competition at  stream six. The rules of this competition dictated still frames at 10 second intervals. My entry placed third, out of a total of three. I've since submitted the poem to AllPoetry, where it has received some interesting feedback. I've responded with a bit more information on the methods and motivation behind it, so check up there if you're interested.
Valmet Children is an experimental band project that I participate in.
The production is about machine intelligence. Personally, I believe that it would be extremely unethical to create an AI intelligent enough to reach self-awareness, yet incapable of effecting changes in itself. Of course, there can be no self-conciousness without self-reference, and from there, self-modification is only a step away. This last step is crucial, though, because it equates to the introduction of free will.
I'm glad that self-modification will most likely prove to be a beneficial feature in an AI program - in fact, I think it is a prerequisite for creating a piece of software any human would consider intelligent. Otherwise, I'm afraid a sufficient number of people would not care about incorporating this kind of feedback loop, and any artificial intelligence that we might conjure up would be doomed to the inescapable thought-hell of deterministic consciousness.