The madness of machines mimicking us

Excuse me for a moment, if you will, while I indulge in a little thought experiment.

Let’s imagine a world in the not-too-distant future where the Turing test has finally been beaten.

Man has become indistinguishable from machine, and the boundaries between what is real and virtual have all but crumbled away.

Is this new world a brave one, which we should welcome with open arms? Or a terrifying prospect to be shunned?

Two recent advances, announced within a day of each other last month, had me questioning just where our science is taking us.

Both involved Google, that globe-spanning tech behemoth whose oft-quoted motto used to be, “Don’t be evil”, could yet prove to be wholly inappropriate.

Take the first of last month’s ominous announcements, for instance: a “virtual assistant” whose synthesized voice apes human speech so precisely that your average Joe would never know he was speaking to a machine.

This uncannily lifelike imitator is yet to be released to the general public.

But in a demonstration, it was shown to have an entirely natural-sounding phone interaction with the employees of a hair salon and a restaurant. By making use of hesitations, affirmations and interjections, Greg Fountain this robot successfully fooled its human counterparts into thinking that it was real.

The following day, Google showed off an upgrade to its “smart compose” feature that acts in a similar way to the predictive text function on your cellphone. Except that, instead of simply suggesting the next word, this artificial intelligence promises to predict fully fledged sentences, paragraphs and emails.

Aside from the convenience, are such “advances” really desirable, or even necessary?

As the AI revolution takes us further into realms that were previously the preserve of science fiction, we would be wise to heed the warnings of the futurists and thinkers who make it their business to shine a light on the dark uncertainties of tomorrow that so many of us would rather not see.

What benefit, after all, could we derive from teaching machines to mimic us?

And if such “services” are already capable of conning us into thinking they are conscious, what hope do we have of distinguishing them once the next big breakthrough is made?

Google is not the only player in this AI arms race. According to Forbes, China leads the world in patent applications for artificial intelligence.

So as we all rush headlong toward a future that we can barely imagine, might it be time to take our collective foot off the gas pedal and consider the consequences?