© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 27
Have you ever had one of those days when nothing works? It starts with a bottle falling as you open the refrigerator and ends with financially catastrophic vehicle failure. Along the way, the Photostat machine jams, your e-mail refuses to receive critical messages and your printer won’t talk to the computer. Some people have bad hair days: others, less fortunate, have bad technology days.
There’s a lot of speculation that machines have more intelligence than they are credited for, and that they are in fact ‘out to get us’. Horror writers, science fiction writers and Hollywood have mined the theme to the extent that even the coffee machine appears threatening. This becomes entirely believable when you pour water in and are rewarded not with a fine, full-bodied coffee, but with a burst of scalding steam and coffee grounds coating your face: a case of insult added to injury.
Science fiction author and noted academic Isaac Asimov refused to travel anywhere that could not be reached quickly on foot. One wonders if there was something he wasn’t telling us about mechanical mode of transport?
Isaac Asimov is best known for developing the three laws of robotics. The first law is that a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The second law is that a robot must obey orders from humans unless they conflict with the First Law. The third law is that a robot must protect its own existence as long as the protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Scientists have adopted the laws of robotics as an example of ‘how it should be done’ but seem to have forgotten that the laws were illustrated in a series of short stories that set out to show how they could easily and inadvertently be broken. The future looks bleak.
The argument that a tool is only as good as its wielder holds true. Programming flaws and their results are just as irritating as the software developers who make the mistakes. However, in an attempt to help machines better understand what to do, and adjust for omissions by human programmers, we are now presented with the very threatening concept of ‘fuzzy logic’.
According to fuzzy logic, it’s not just a matter of ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘on’ or ‘off’ anymore: there are now states of suitability or correctness in-between. Woe betide us, and I hope your personal relationship with your automatic bank teller is on a really solid footing. Have you considered inviting it to lunch? Apparently it works with the human variety of banker.
This is old news. Way back ‘when’ at the dawn of history, Caveman Og had plenty to say about the new technology for making fire and how the flintstone squashed his thumb every time he tried to produce a spark. The form of the complaint is fixed: it’s just the technology and the specific nature of the problem that changes.
Machines help us the way a prosthetic is an aid to a one-legged man. There is always something left to regret, and something more to want. Humanity seeks perfection, and machines are one route to that goal.
The nature of perfection is apparently a state of eternal bliss in which no effort is expended, but everything is rewarding. In the quest for a perfect life, we have developed phones to answer our calls, devices that watch and record television for us, and even robotic pets that don’t mess on the carpet or demand to sleep on our legs at night.
Yet we cannot be perfect, and so our machines aren’t perfect. We still have to gather our understanding from manuals that appear to be written by a dyslexic with an alcohol dependency. And even though we manage to simplify our technology to the point where one button controls everything, the complexity of using that one button requires a degree in quantum engineering.
Machines are not solutions or problems. Actually they are challenges. And as new technologies are introduced, the real challenge is not how to better understand and use them, but how to limit our dependency. Machines aren’t out to get us. Our laziness will.
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