Robby, the Midnight Marauder
How smart things are running our lives (and wrecking our sleep)
It’s midnight at the Davis Household, or as our friend says, ‘Oh dark hundred hours’. (Our friend was a physician assistant in the U.S. air force; she knows oh dark hundred hours).
Whatever, it’s dark. It’s after Lisa LaFlamme and Jimmy Kimmel have tucked us in for the night. I hear a little chime, like a tiny bugle. Ba-dum-dah-dah! Charge! Like that. Then there’s a tiny, distant whirring sound, like it’s next door, maybe out on the street. Whir. A minute later, it’s louder, down the hallway from the bedroom. Whirrrrrr. And then, in another minute, it’s right outside the bedroom, about to hop onto the rug. This is just before it becomes really loud and gets stuck under the bed. WHIRRRR! It goes. Wakey wakey, I’m here!
Meet Robby, our little round robot vacuum cleaner. I have fiddled with his dials, changed his time zone I don’t know how many times. I have unplugged him. All to no good. When Robby wants to clean house, he cleans house. For him, oh-dark-hundred is the Perfect Time. Robby has a mind of his own. Clearly.
And he’s not alone in our world; there are tons of things you could call smart things. The microwave with its 50 buttons. The thermostat. The stereo system that runs from my phone (when it wants to, that’s a long story just by itself ). Have you read about the Smart Fridge? This thing, we’ll call him Fred, can tell when you’re out of orange juice or milk, send a notice to your local grocery store who’ll add it to your weekly grocery delivery list, then deliver it. By drone probably. Then there are smart cars, the driverless ones, that can take you all the way to Pittsburgh and back, never get lost once, maybe even guess when you have to stop and pee or get a diet pop. Then there’s those new phones that won’t let you type a swear word when you. Really. Want. To. Type. One. (Not, you know, that we’d ever want to. Much.)
What worries me (not that much worries me at oh-darkhundred hours, apart from Robby) is the things that are — or will be — smarter than us. Ever watch the movie 2001, the one with Hal the computer? Hal figures out that its mission (flying to Methuselah IV or something. I forget the details) is being obstructed by Dave, the lonely pilot/astronaut. Hal takes advantage of a repair job that makes poor Dave leave the spaceship. Hal locks Dave out of the ship. This is not good for our hero, you can imagine. (It had to be a Dave by the way; we never get a break. We also never get the real goodlooking, romantic parts either. I digress.)
This stuff raises a whole bunch of questions. Here’s one for those of us who think about medical education: what will doctors do in an age when artificial intelligence takes over or augments their roles in diagnosing disease and weighing best treatment options? Or this one: how can those of us still stuck in late twentieth and early twenty-first century thinking even begin to teach students who will practice well past 2050? Most medical schools still LECTURE to 20-something kids who have phones attached to their palms for Pete’s sake!
Let me get serious here (it’ll only last a second; you’ll hardly notice).
Supposing the driverless car decides you don’t actually NEED a pee break or that drink? Supposing Fred, the high IQ Fridge, decides you don’t NEED orange juice? You need the new acaiberry prune concoction that’s on sale down at the local Veggies-RUs. Could happen. The NY Times talks about AI a lot. I mean a lot. For sure, the Times mentions the good things, like how it could be used to predict earthquakes or forecast weather. But also lots of bad things, too, like AI-created art (take that, Picasso), or employment worries (pathologists and radiologists, say), or Hal.
Steven Hawking (now there’s smart for you) said that artificial intelligence may be the greatest threat to mankind, greater even than global warming. You could see how a novelist could really make something out of this: the smarter-than-us things on the planet get the bright idea that it’s us who’re wrecking the earth with our polluting and sabre rattling (oh, and midnight tweeting, but I digress again) and, well, that’s the end of us.
All of this thinking could keep a person awake at night. Reminds me: I better barricade the bedroom door tonight. Take that, Robby!