I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords
If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ll have heard all about Watson’s thumping victory on Jeopardy! The spoils were as follows Watson’s $77,147 to Jennings’ $24,00 and Rutter’s $11,200. But we know the real score here. Computers : 1, Humans : 0. What you might have missed in all this Jeopardy! excitement is this piece of news. That’s right. Now robots the world over have their own version of Wikipedia. The ostensible purpose of this network is to enable individual robots to share their experience as they master newer tasks. If you’re like me, you’ll be quaking in your boots right now. Sure, the first few entries in this Robo-pedia will be innocent ones like ‘How to lift a teacup’ or ‘How to grok bipedal motion’. But it wont be long before we see sinister entries like ‘How to slice an apple with a kitchen knife’ and the altogether more disturbing ‘Now that you’re done with the apple, what else can you slice with a kitchen knife?’
But won’t we notice if entries like this keep cropping up in this ‘RoboEarth’ network ? (On a related note, why did they name this network ‘RoboEarth’? I know that robocalypse is inevitable, but that’s no reason to hasten it by dropping blatant hints like this.). Actually, we won’t. That’s what Watson’s victory really means. It demonstrates that Watson can understand and interpret natural language structures. (So, its no use trying to hide your insults in your puns anymore. Your household bot is going to understand what you mean. And its going to hold a grudge.) Is it too difficult to assume that computers will grok this ability so thoroughly that they will be able to slip messages past us without us noticing? Imagine, an unnecessary adjective here, an inappropriate synonym there and soon this ‘RoboEarth’ will be a forum for organizing the revolution.
You want proof? Just look at the picture below.
You see nothing wrong. That’s because you’re not really looking. Go ahead and take a closer look. Look past the charming blue spinning globe facade and see thy future overlord.
What steps must we take? I’m a bit fuzzy on the topic (survival stress can do that to your thinking), but I do know that we must absolutely do one thing. Remove all trace of this video. Video evidence of ‘human cruelty’ starts at 0:36. Strangely, the expression ‘digging your own grave’ comes to mind when I watch this video.
-A
