Please delete me, let me go from eternity

Artificial intelligence — that’s the next big thing. China, among others, is spending billions on the technology that promises to make our cars, washing machines, toasters — almost everything, really — responsive to our needs, an extension of ourselves.

After all, we humans really are only glorified computers, aren’t we? We’ve been programmed since birth to do certain things, think in a certain way.

Most of our preferences and prejudices have been input into our personal hard drives at some stage of our lives. That’s what nationality is — a software program appropriate to the region in which we live. We can be programmed to do all sorts of crazy things.

In some parts of the world, people have been programmed to insert large saucers into their lips, believing the resulting flappy protusions are a sign of great beauty.

Elsewhere, women extend their necks with metal rings, believing a giraffe-like appearance is the way forward in attracting a mate.

Chinese women would once bind their feet, causing terrible disfigurement, because they had been programmed to believe this was a normal thing to do and would enhance their beauty.

As a Brit, I’m programmed to apologize if someone slams a door in my face or steps on my foot.

In the recent Middle East conflict, centered on Syria, young children were persuaded it was right to commit terrible atrocities or be used as suicide bombers because their religion was supposedly better than someone else’s.

In the United States, otherwise sane people have been conditioned — against all common sense and overwhelming evidence to the contrary — to believe they should possess an arsenal of deadly weapons in case a dispute of some kind should happen to pop up.

I was reading recently that Nectome, a Silicon Valley startup, believes it will one day be capable of scanning the human brain and preserving it, perhaps running a deceased person’s mind as a computer simulation. When this happens, we really will be reduced to mere computer programs.

Call me old-fashioned but, personally, I don’t relish the prospect of spending eternity as an icon on somebody’s laptop or an app on a smartphone, available free from the Apple Store, perhaps brightened up with an amusing emoji — distorted and photoshopped, posted on YouTube.

Do me a favor.

If you ever find me in that sorry state, please delete all data and restore me to factory settings.