Mind out for robots
SCIENCE fiction is literature’s country bumpkin cousin, but I’ve loved it since I zoomed around with Harry Harrison’s scandalous Stainless Steel Rat and scared myself witless reading John Wyndham’s chilling The Day of the Triffids.
EM Forster’s The Machine Stops predicted a weakling human race enslaved by technology, including a messaging system you might call the internet. He wrote it in 1909.
The late Scot Iain Banks created The Culture series. He envisaged we humans evolving into a bunch of hedonistic hippies with a few flinty-eyed hardcases – Special Circumstances – keeping us safe.
Key to this universe is that while the machines can outthink us, they kind of like and even respect us.
With Bank of England governor Mark Carney apocalyptically warning 15million jobs will soon go to robots, perhaps we ought to start treating the machines well.
Just finishing up on TV is Westworld, based on the 1973 gunslinger-themed film of the same name. The series concentrates on what happens if we give androids the sort of intelligence we have – the capability to think, learn, love and the free will to kill.
It’s disturbing stuff as lead character Dolores Abernathy, played by Evan Rachel Wood, goes through an endless cycle of abuse to become sentient.
In the real world, the march of technology is increasing in pace; the robots’ rise getting faster.
Already my car speaks to me, calling out the turns ahead, switching radio stations at my hands-free command; reminding me if I leave my phone behind when I step out.
It’s simple to use and compliant, useful technology.
But out there somewhere you know we are – as we do with all humanity’s discoveries – weaponising the machines. Films are littered with computerised baddies, from Robot in Lost in Space, Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ash in Alien.
Very soon we are going to have to decide in which direction we want to point our advancing technology.
Sci-fi writers have littered the way with warning signposts.