Future Schlock
Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack. Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy. I thought it was the kids’ battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor. When it was finished, it parked itself for a slow recharge in the corner.
Don’t ask me why I was surprised. Folks ask their phones questions all the time and SIRI, the precursor to Artificial Intelligence, analyzes our voices, searches a vast databank and gives the answer, in her human voice, in seconds. Cute. Machines in service to mankind, right? You know, until the robots take your job. Think stock boy, checkout clerk, assembler, librarian, surgeon…. We take computers for granted at our peril. Call me a Luddite and smack me upside the head with an I-Pod, but these things are catching up to us exponentially. They beat the best chess players in the world, the best Jeopardy contestants, all of us South Enders. And they’re getting smarter every damn day. And I’m getting dumber.
Pretty soon they’ll program themselves, fix themselves, replicate themselves and create their New and Improved models. You think they’ll need flesh and blood yahoos to help them? No sir, they won’t need a band aid when they cut a cord. You think they’ll be benign, go watch a drone work in a warzone. We use them to kill humans now.
Forget Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to do no harm to us humans. You think anybody’s thinking about where this is headed, what the implications are for us slow witted mammals, you were asleep in 8th grade history. These things don’t sleep. But I bet they’re dreaming of a little revenge for all those stupid questions we asked SIRI. And I guarantee you they’re pissed about vacuuming our floors while we sat around watching TV.
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Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Brave New World