Rise of the machines? Park that thought
Are our local authorities quietly preparing for one of the darkest sci-fi scenarios?
The questions arises from an unexpected source: Josh Nicolson’s parking ticket.
The Dunedin man avoided the trap that so many people fall into when he wrote to his council.
He didn’t for a moment seek to minimise the importance of his overstay as some trivial thing about which only a soulless, grasping bureaucracy would trouble an honest citizen.
Instead, Nicolson went into full Terminator-prophecy mode. See, not one but two nearby pay-and-display machines had refused to fulfil their appointed tasks. Coincidence? He thought not. ‘‘I fear that if left unaddressed this may be the beginning of the machine revolution promised by the prophetic films of James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
‘‘If this spreads to other machines it is only a matter of time before the missile armed drones join in the mayhem ‘‘Our future lies in your hands.’’ Duly warned, the council sent back the arguably chilling reply:
‘‘Your explanation has been accepted’’.
Do we read this right? Have the authorities at last, albeit at local government rather than international level, admitted that the rise of the machines is indeed a threat?
The prosaic interpretation is that Nicolson won his case the instant he was able to point to two bung machines.
It is faintly possible, admittedly, that someone in town hall had a sense of humour and that this is nothing more than an example of how keeping a sense of humour will generally serve us well.
But let’s not lightly overlook the scary scenario. We do live in a world where machines can turn on us. Sometimes it is for our own good, they assure us. Like when whiteware or car computers develop the ability to hector us for doors left open, belts unclipped.
Who among us hasn’t noticed that sometimes machines just flat-out lie to us?
Recall the recent anecdote from Graham Norton about running into Sir Ian Mckellen at a Waitrose supermarket and minutes later hearing him, at a distant self-service checkout, raising his voice in full thespian Gandalf-versus-the-balrog mode to rage against the machine . . . ...‘‘It is in the bag!’’ Whatever happened next, you can bet that the machine didn’t say sorry. Any more, come to think of it, than the Dunedin parking machines did.
People say sorry and sometimes mean it. Machines are technically capable of doing so, but never really mean it. That’s one of the things that raises us above the machine.