Reasons to be excited about artificial intelligence…
You’ll live to 120
Medical advances will be astonishing when AI gets scrubbed up, gowned and on the case. Major diseases will be eradicated; wonder drugs invented; old age and mortality itself will come under serious scrutiny by AI ‘scientists’, who won’t get tired, make mistakes or fall in love with the colleague with the sexy control panel. GPs will have endless time for your woes when they’re super-smart AIs in virtual consulting rooms. And robots will perform more, perhaps all, operations. The surgeon, with nothing to do, will be calling at your bedside to ask if you’ve moved your bowels today.
Your house will be your butler
The intelligent stuff in your home will be properly smart. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana and their kind are still basically speech-recognition systems and not yet characters you’d want to get placed next to at dinner. But our devices and appliances will soon be making complex decisions and talking to each other: the dishwasher telling the app on your mobile that you’ve stacked it only 64 per cent efficiently; the phone deciding you’ve had enough bad news for one week and keeping it to itself. That’s good, isn’t it?
Work won’t be boring any more!
AI promises an end to human drudgery. Gone will be jobs such as driving, selling houses, reading legal documents, teaching children and writing magazine articles. Machines will do all that. And they’ll never get bored, drink out of your mug or get legless at the office party and snog Gavin from accounts. Just like the lamplighters and bobbin boys of history, whole careers will disappear and in their place will rise entirely new professions such as driverless car designer, psychotherapist for robots and ‘lawyer actress whatever’. Millions will be freed from what Philip Larkin called ‘the toad’ work to concentrate on having fun.
Leisure will be mind expanding
AI will revolutionise VR – virtual reality – which is still mainly for teenage boys who enjoy wearing a headset and blowing things to bits. Once AI has sorted out the problem of jerky pictures and the dizziness users experience when they turn their heads too fast, VR is set to kill conventional telly as most people will prefer to have adventures in magical lands. Mary Berry and Simon Cowell may survive as faces glimpsed on a virtual TV, in a virtual bar, where you have dropped in with your good friends George Clooney and Michelle Obama after many happy hours together exploring the Amazon rainforest. Huw Edwards, on the next barstool, will tell you the evening news over ‘cocktails’.
People will come to prefer VR to RR (real reality) and you have to say WWT (why wouldn’t they)?
No one will be lonely
While AI develops a cure for Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, there will be a huge market for an intelligent in-ear assistant able to whisper all manner of helpful hints and tips to wearers, such as: ‘This is your grandson, Josh’; ‘The solution to 12 down is watercress’, or ‘Have you remembered to take your pill?’ Socially isolated younger people will find a sensitive and sympathetic digital companion with whom to discuss their worries or just hang out. And, of course – young or old – the AI ‘buddies’ will be brilliant at matchmaking. You think you’ll never find someone who shares your love of tap dancing, Norse poetry and the music of Iron Maiden? Meet Alex B from Leitrim!
We will discover ‘the meaning of life’
If an AI device can become a top chess player in almost the time it takes to watch Titanic, imagine what it could do with really tricky problems such as where did the universe come from? Is the human soul immortal? Or, once and for all, where is Wally?
AI will end human suffering and take us to the stars and beyond. It will solve the ‘unknown unknowns’ leaving us to wonder – for all their brilliance and all our relative stupidity – why they still (fingers crossed) seem to like having us around.
OUR DEVICES AND APPLIANCES WILL SOON BE TALKING TO EACH OTHER