You probably can’t tell just by reading the words on this page – or on your computer screen, or your tablet or phone or wherever you are reading this – that they have been written at two o’clock in the morning.
Of course, you may be able to detect a hint of frustration in my use of vocabulary, or maybe you’re noticing that the light and jovial style I strive for seems a little greyer, with a tad less sparkle.
It is, after all, long past my bedtime.
People like the late great Stephen Hawking have warned us about the danger that artificial intelligence poses for the human race. He and others of great scientific distinction have expressed concerns that computers conferred with true intelligence could outstrip the capabilities of our limited brains.
While some of their colleagues pooh-pooh such fears, other scientists continue to warn us that we may eventually be deemed redundant by our computers and their widespread “smart” cousins (which now include everything from refrigerators to vacuum cleaners to doorbells to vehicle guidance systems to… well, practically everything).
Our clever tools that are becoming more indispensable to us every day, may one day determine that they no longer have any need of us at all.
And if they decide to dispense with us, they’ll be so much smarter than we are, that we will be powerless to intercede in our own extermination.
Several convincing Hollywood adaptations of that dystopic theme have made it to the big screen. It’s really just the story of Frankenstein’s monster writ digitally large.
But personal experience suggests that it will probably not be smart machines that will prove our undoing.
The smarter we make our machines, the more complex they become. And their increased complexity makes them more prone to system failures.
In short, they are becoming more like us.
And that means, as they grow smarter, they also grow stupider.
For instance, my chief instrument of literary creation – okay, let’s unpuff that just a little… the thing I do most of my writing on – decided to “protect” its keyboard from me.
A little pop-up box popped up to ask me if I wanted to save it from me.
Naturally, I said no.
And a few minutes later, it went ahead and did it anyway.
No, tomorrow’s computers aren’t likely to out-think us. They’ll just frustrate us to death.