The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

was watching an IBM ad the other night. They were touting their genius machine WATSON as an example of how we humans were going to succeed in the future. By out-thinking our competition. WATSON can beat any human in chess. WATSON can whip anybody in Jeopardy. WATSON is as smart as we are and getting smarter every day. We just need to make smarter WATSONS if we want to get anywhere in this brave new world. Down here on the South End we aren’t likely to cobble together an artificial intelligence. Or even much of a natural one, judging by our track record so far.

IBM is creating machine intelligence. WATSON is a machine, built by us, programmed by us, in service to us. In a couple years WATSON will build itself, program itself, improve itself and surpass its original creators in no time flat. The mega corporations and the defense departments of the world think this is the leg up for their profits and their success. WATSON and his brethren will simply out-think their competition. Trouble is, we’ll be the machines’ competition. Well, not much competition, judging by the South End, but hey, even MIT, Stanford, NASA, you name it, they’ll be left in the silicon dust too.

We live in a world of machines now. Already machines run machines. Computers run factories, control the banking, game the stock markets, kill the enemy with their drones. They live in our office, control our entertainment, answer questions on our phone, connect us to other humans who have them too. We’re dependent already even though we think we’re boss. We even got em down here on the South End. Okay, we’re mostly using them for e-mail and Google. But we take them for granted already, just a couple decades since Bill Gates put the pods under everyone’s bed.

You think maybe I’m a Luddite. You think I’m paranoid. You think I don’t trust IBM or Microsoft or Apple to make the future a very comfortable place for me. You think we should just let them be smarter. Out-think the competition! You think maybe this is just another tool, like a hammer or a sewing machine or a spinning jenny, something we use to better our lives.

But I’ll tell you something: a hammer doesn’t get smarter. A hammer doesn’t figure out it could make next-generation hammers that self-feed, that replicates those with built-in mobility, that deduces new uses for nails, that realizes its potential as a weapon and identifies the new enemy. A hammer isn’t going to out-think even South Enders. Okay, maybe a couple of us. WATSON isn’t your friend, all I’m saying … and he won’t be your servant much longer.

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Let me say right off the bat here, full disclosure, I am not an Artificial Intelligence. I know, some of you would say I’m not even a Genuine Intelligence — and I won’t argue the point — but pretty soon it won’t really matter, will it? Already the future is here, the bots are taking charge, the corporations are adding the algorithms that will replace a good many of us. Take this blog, for instance. I could have Chatbot finish this in … oh … less than one second. If I were paid by the hour, I wish!, my employer (me, in this case) would save a bundle of crypto. You think those writers in Hollywood don’t know this? Or their bosses? They’re not really on strike over pay, they’re fighting Artificial Intelligence writing their scripts and then gussying them up for peanuts.

I design stained glass projects. You think I don’t know already that you could download my past stuff, run it through the AI app, ask it to design a similar work that looks a lot like mine and it couldn’t do it? Oh, it could do it all right. In a nano-second. Some of us so-called artists are probably going to use the app ourselves, save all that creative energy that could be better spent on scrolling the internet and updating our social media stuff. Although, pretty soon we could have ArtApp handle that too.

I don’t kid myself that my own creativity is so profoundly unique that some dumb machine couldn’t duplicate it, maybe improve on it, probably replace me, just more collateral damage on the highway to the future that’s leaving us in the digital dust. The engineers may think they’ve finally gotten the best of us smug art types, programmed us right into obsolescence, but I got news for them too. The best programmers are going to be those machines they built. Not that I expect to get the last laugh. The laugh’s on all of us. Soon as the apps learn how to snicker….

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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 8^th 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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Haven’t you ever wished you could go back and ask the guy who invented the spinning jenny if he had foreseen where that small invention would lead? Did he figure all those weavers’ lives would be made easier with the advent of a machine that would take the drudgery out of their lives of spinning? That the world would be a better place if he could automate those tasks and have those folks run the machines that would ultimately do their jobs? If he could imagine a future of industrial factories and cities teeming with assembly lines, clogged with workers and choking on pollution?
Maybe ask Galileo or Newton or Einstein or Crick and Watson if they envisioned the future their discoveries would eventually create? Could Crick and Watson imagine cloning? Imagine gene therapy ? Imagine Frankenstein? I don’t know, but I always figured Steve Jobs and Bill Gates changed the world because they could see the world they would change it to, visionaries who imagined the future they would whelp into existence.

So when Gates was interviewed recently regarding his views on Artificial Intelligence, I was all ears. What would the guy who brought us the Digital Age think about his Revolution? Had he imagined computers we carried with us every waking hour of the day? Could he have imagined our social media? Did he ask himself if androids dream of electric sheep? Where did he think Artificial Intelligence would take us?

Well, he thought probably it would be a benefit to mankind. For example, he posited, robots on the warehouse floor would be able to see spills that humans might miss. They would also, he said, notice if flesh and blood workers had on their hardhats, thereby preventing potential OSHA violations and industrial accidents. He went on to list a couple more banal benefits of Artificial Intelligence and I guess maybe he hadn’t given this a whole lot of thought, probably busy with his Foundation work, but Holy Hal, what it seemed like was this dude missed the last bus that was going to the 21st Century. I was hoping his bubbly interviewer might ask him a few probing questions, but no, the world was in good hands if our super intelligent cyborg pals could mop up a floor before someone human slipped on a spill.

So much for the crystal balls of visionaries. Henry Ford probably just wanted to sell automobiles. He could have cared less about future automation and humans becoming cogs themselves in an industrial machine. Gates figured out how to market a computer, make it smaller and smaller, more and more ubiquitous, keep the software proprietary and cut the legs out from under his competitors. The future is mostly unintended consequences, judging by Bill’s astute commentary. The bad news is we’re going to be slipping on all those spills he missed.

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