Would we be able to programme a robot to throw a coffee cup or storm out for a beer whenever the significant other said something insensitive? Could manufacturers offer warranties against separation or divorce?
...and in news from the BBC and several other global websites, millions of virtual monkeys have more or less written the complete works of Shakespeare. They wrote it bit by bit in strings of letters, nine characters long without spaces. A subroutine pulled out all the bits that made sense and reassembled them as the works of the Bard.
The idea of monkeys writing the works of Shakespeare has been around about forever. It began as an interesting bit of amusements for aficionados of probability, and gained a life of its own as people began to ask, “Who is this Shakespeare guy, and why do we need to respect him, when all we need is a troop of monkeys who know how to point their fingers at a keyboard and press a whole lot of times?”
The next logical step in this train of thought is to start teaching monkeys to read. If humanity can get this right then the burden of reading Shakespeare goes away forever. If we can get virtual monkeys to read Shakespeare, all the better: we save on bananas and we don't have to clean up after them. Maybe we could invent virtual bananas to give them a reason to read. When we get that right, we can finally focus on the really important thing: watching television.
Computers started it. They were a great way to get rid of the routine tasks: adding this number to that number, and repeating the operation as many times as there were journal entries in the ledger or as often as your workforce needed to be paid. That was great. Other than the crashes when the system got confused by a punch card and melted down, everything worked.
The problems kicked in when people started wondering what else computers could do, other than being room-sized status symbols for accountants and scientists? CAD followed. “Hey, look everyone! I can draw a straight line! That's art for you. Anyone ever see Picasso draw a straight line?”
And with that the stage was set for hundreds of millions of amateur designers who were liberated by their newly found ability to make a colour gradient from purple to green as the perfect background for a logo with a metallic sheen.
I wish there were computers which could look at that stuff for me.
A recent National Geographic article on robots points to the future. One of the ideas, doing the rounds is robots that can learn and mimic human emotions. The big idea is to use them for rearing children and caring for the elderly. The one caution raised is that withdrawal of the device might cause problems. There you have it folks: human interaction replaced by the computer.
Just imagine one of those inserted into the equation of the standard relationship. Would we be able to programme a robot to throw a coffee cup or storm out for a beer whenever the significant other said something insensitive? Could manufacturers offer warranties against separation or divorce?
Nothing is sacred.
The article uses the word 'disconnected', in the sense that humanity is becoming disconnected from real human interaction. It is not a new phenomenon. Television has replaced conversation in millions of homes. And not so long ago, virtual pets replaced real ones.
One of the root causes is that people who are attracted to technology are people who cannot cope with an existence that includes other humans. Some of these people become developers, shuttered away from the world. Their motivation is that a programming routine can be controlled and should, in theory, not offer responses that deviate from what they want to experience.
The results of these routines are adopted by people who don't want deviation from the routine either and, in a strange way, technology becomes the object of the exercise, not a tool. It is not a healthy situation and it tells of a coming time in which the emotional intelligence needed to deal with the unexpected or even the routine, begins to deteriorate.
The world wants a certain amount of emotion, but it won't get it. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to plug in my iPod and drown out the noise of the day.
Funny...several years ago, as part of a creative writing course, I wrote a synopsis for a children's novel about a society where children were removed from their biological parents and raised by robots, because the government of the time thought that humans made such crap parents. But I set it aside because I thought it was too far-fetched...
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ReplyDeleteIf it's unimaginable, humans will imagine it.
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