Who are your best friends? Is it Ritu, Shilpa living next
door or is it the high-end sophisticated digital assistants like Siri, Alexa
etc. by your side.
Is it your mom instructing you to slow down your pace, breathe
slowly, have water and speak patiently at your customer care job or is it some
software commanding you to be super friendly with your clients to understand
their needs?
Does your child wake up to a lullaby (set by you to go off
at day-break) by an Automaton?
Did you all just randomly start off for a road trip and
enjoying as per your heart or being constantly nagged by a gizmo guiding you to
have more exciting options than soak in the beauty of one place?
Huh! The list is endless.
Gadgets are learning about my mood, my behavior, my health
stats and what not! From recommending to buy blue coloured ankle length socks
that matches with the boots which I had bought last week, to watch movies based
on my last flick online to predicting my body ailments ten years from now
depending on my current lifestyle, they know it all. And even if they don’t,
they are perceiving it gradually through our quick revelations on various
platforms which hastens their learning process. Be it Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter or Snapchat we are pouring our heart out and unveiling whole lot of
personal real life data to the virtual world.
Time is not far-off when co-habitation with machines would
be the fate. Imagine an advertisement : Flat mate needed for 1 bhk apartment, One
Machine already living and comprehending! In small forms machines are joining
us from the first-light. Keeping track of my morning jog to my gastrectomy in midnight slumber, they are taking care instead
monitoring me all the time.
A recent debate between the tech bigwigs Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk stating that artificial intelligence is going
to kill us all, sparked the fear of annihilation in me and I started to think
about myself, err the new generations of faux-intelligent entities to be
specific. What followed the discussion was even more harrowing. I found that
Facebook had to shut down its AI systems after the chatbots started chatting in
a language of their own instead of English which could not be understood by
humans. For now, it was named to be a malfunction but the background picture
could be worse and threatening.
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| Courtesy : Google Images |
I am not against innovation in technology but what I feel is
that machines are controlling us in various spheres apart from few naïve ones
which aid us in our work. Time is just right to have a proper curriculum to
which they should adhere to and learn only few things instead of our whole
biological existence. Moreover, the irony of life is that the most brilliant
brains who are leading Automation are losing jobs to these self-executing
bodies only. This planet was destroyed by human beings in terms of nature and
now advancement of technology if not regulated might fade away the
homo-sapiens.
With this thought that I don’t want my brain to be enslaved
by some synthetic spirit, I rest my itchy fingers and keep the shut–down button
handy with the hope that there is a watchdog for these Artifical Beings.
Additionally, I don’t want to be caught in a Matrix or be surrounded by
I-Robots.
Let me know what you think before my article mysteriously
disappears off the internet!!
