SYLLABUS FOR THE BOTS!!

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.

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!!