Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack.\u00a0 Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy.\u00a0 I thought it was the kids\u2019 battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor.\u00a0 When it was finished, it parked itself for a slow recharge in the corner.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t ask me why I was surprised.\u00a0 Folks ask their phones questions all the time and SIRI, the precursor to Artificial Intelligence, analyzes our voices, searches a vast databank and gives the answer, in her human voice, in seconds.\u00a0 Cute.\u00a0 Machines in service to mankind, right?\u00a0 You know, until the robots take your job.\u00a0 Think stock boy, checkout clerk, assembler, librarian, surgeon\u2026.\u00a0 We take computers for granted at our peril.\u00a0\u00a0 Call me a Luddite and smack me upside the head with an I-Pod, but these things are catching up to us exponentially.\u00a0 They beat the best chess players in the world, the best Jeopardy contestants, all of us South Enders.\u00a0 And they\u2019re getting smarter every damn day.\u00a0 And I\u2019m getting dumber.<\/p>\n
Pretty soon they\u2019ll program themselves, fix themselves, replicate themselves and create their New and Improved models.\u00a0 You think they\u2019ll need flesh and blood yahoos to help them?\u00a0 No sir, they won\u2019t need a band aid when they cut a cord.\u00a0 You think they\u2019ll be benign, go watch a drone work in a warzone.\u00a0 We use them to kill humans now.<\/p>\n
Forget Asimov\u2019s Laws of Robotics to do no harm to us humans.\u00a0 You think anybody\u2019s thinking about where this is headed, what the implications are for us slow witted mammals, you were asleep in 8th<\/sup> grade history. \u00a0These things \u00a0don\u2019t sleep.\u00a0 But I bet they\u2019re dreaming of a little revenge for all those stupid questions we asked SIRI.\u00a0 And I guarantee you they\u2019re pissed about vacuuming our floors while we sat around watching TV.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Down here on the tech savvy South End, one of my neighbors I recently visited had a gizmo circling the livingroom of their shack.\u00a0 Cute little bugger, making the circuit like an Attention Deficit puppy.\u00a0 I thought it was the kids\u2019 battery toy, but no, I was watching a robot vacuuming the floor.\u00a0 When it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20147"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20148,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20147\/revisions\/20148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}