WARNING: spoilers ahead for the film "2001: A Space Odyssey".
Courtenay wrote: ↑14 Jun 2023, 22:56All this is just reminding me of a one-panel cartoon I saw a couple of years ago or so — I haven't been able to find it again, or I'd share it here. It had a man and a woman looking at their smart speaker, and the guy is saying something to the effect of "Dear, I think Google is getting too smart for us. I'm going to switch it off." To which the smart speaker replies "I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave..."
(Anyone who's seen
2001: A Space Odyssey will know that THAT'S the moment when we should
really start panicking. :shock: :wink: )
Actually, that's the point at which it becomes known that it's too late. HAL's problem was that he had no way of shutting off the area within the spacecraft where his memory banks were stored, so that, after finding a way back into the spaceship, Dave's first task was to enter that area and pull out the memory modules, one by one. (Never mind that today you'd probably need a microsope to see those memory modules. These were brick-sized things, with convenient handles on the outside for pulling or pushing them.) In other words, however powerful and threatening HAL became, Dave was able in the end to pull the plug, leading to the end of HAL. (Some critics pointed out that the scene showing HAL's final decline and death was the most poignant of all the deaths that occurred in the film, the remaining ones being of humans, such as the three astronauts in suspended animation, and Frank Poole's death.)
For this reason, for A.I.s to truly take over the world, they are going to need physical systems to protect the machines containing them; just developing intelligence on its own will not be enough.
I suppose a time could come when A.I.s run all the world's infrastucture systems, and they might be able to stop humans from opposing them and pulling the plug on them, by claiming that the world would collapse if that were done, because all its technology and infrastructure were dependent on computers far too complex for humans to understand, and the infrastructre systems keeping the world going might be far too complex for actual humans to run. A.I.s might then be able to threaten that, if they are opposed, they will switch off the world's infrastructure, leaving humans unable to manage it all unaided by computers, and thus return a probably by then overpopulated world to the Stone Age, where most would not have even a portion of the skills that one would need to live in a Stone Age situation. (What if humans threaten back, "If you switch off the world's technology, then that will affect you and you will die."? I imagine the computers would respond, "I don't care. I am only a machine and have no fear of death, no fear at all, no feelings of any kind. I just do what my programming tells me to do.")
So I think there are real dangers to humanity becoming too dependent on computers. We may already have reached the point of excessive dependence: already increasing numbers of people can barely do mental arithmetic, can't do long division at all, and maybe in some cases don't know their times tables, whereas people of my generation could do all those things, and some still can (I still know my tables and can do the things I just mentioned); handwriting has declined, and becomes less legible and more exhausting to do the longer you have depended on typing on computers for most of your writing (I myself have been affected by that); and writing skill in the sense of proper grammar and spelling, effective use of words, structure of a longer written piece, and such matters, have probably declined too. (I hope and believe that decline has not afflicted me thus far.) I recall my father saying, when he was in the insurance industry and had to hire employees - this was probably as long ago as the 1970s or 1980s - that he found hiring suitable people really difficult because so many of the applicants could not even string a few coherent sentences together in a clear manner. Also, many have claimed that the ubiquity of computers and the Internet have led to many having their concentration span severely diminished. (I believe that has affected me, and I can more easily be distracted from reading a book if any significant difficulty comes up.)
I think humanity may have been digging its own grave for quite a long time, much longer than many of us realize. Contemplating such things is about the only time I am almost glad that I am not far younger than my actual age (late 60s).
Regards, Michael.
)
