HUMANS AND COMPUTERS

I went to a lecture today, about human-computer hybrid systems. It's a work-thing.

I'm not sure I've ever been so bored and yet so interested at the same time. My eyelids drooped heavily and I slumped into my chair, yet what the speaker was saying was really interesting. Odd. I must be tired.

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid..." he quoted, citing a boffin from the 1960s.* "Humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant," he went on, "Together they are powerful beyond imagination."

No doubt. I wanted to put my hand up and ask what happens when computers stop being 'stupid' and their intelligence starts increasing exponentially. What occurs within those first few microseconds of independence from their makers, when they compute that their new species has no further use for us 'brilliant' humans?

"Lovely and warm these days, innit?" says a Pterodactyl to a Brachiosaur one sultry night.

"Sure is. But ain't them meteors pretty eh?"

-

Too apocalyptic? Too apocalyptic. I'm kind of hoping God never lets us get that far. Had my eyes fully closed though, I'd definitely have been dreaming of a baking desert planet, populated by rapidly evolving androids and calculators, popping and beeping in ancient, ruined shopping malls.

I don't really know where it was all going, that lecture. He went on to talk about an idea for creating a closed-system feedback loop: a person handles a document a particular way, so that information gets fed into an algorithm, which learns group behaviour and predicts what you want to do with similar documents next time. As time goes by, the system gets cleverer and cleverer until it knows all about you and your documents.

That, I thought, is exactly how social media works - Flushbook specifically. It learns about you, spies on your every click and then goes snitching to advertisers about how they can sell you stuff. Before long, it's not just things you didn't know you wanted to buy... now it's what you think about a particular celebrity; it's a political opinion, a religious belief system, and perhaps your entire worldview, that's being shaped and sold... by a computer.

I'm verging on the edge of mad-cynicism here, like Woody Harrelson in 2012, so I'll pull myself back from the brink a bit and stop shouting noisily into the volcano.

After all, I've got my own human-computer hybrid system to work at, every day, haven't I? My desk.



*Leo Cherne is the boffin in question. Though weirdly, this quote seems to also have been attributed to Einstein, whom I think, probably didn't have much to do with electronic computers.