American Fez

Chips Off The Old Bloc

I'm always wryly amused that Silicon Valley boffins don't invent AI robots capable of putting themselves out of work. Surely it's an easy task to program computers that can author computer code and build neural networks; certainly easier than designing a self-driving car or a virtual assistant that knows the exact type of muesli its master prefers. Progress is wonderful, no doubt, provided it doesn't eliminate the need for your own particular area of expertise. 

But perhaps one day we will get lucky, and some brilliant cyberneticist will develop an automaton political brain capable of superseding our current crop of venal and conceited lawmakers. This is the sort of serviceable Singularity all sane citizens must support. After all, the only systemic 'corruption' such technology would encounter is damage to its internal hard drive and file structure, as bionic congressmen will be immune to backhanders, corporate agendas, greed, or any kind of personal bias. Vote Digital Disraeli for a better world.

The future of our democracy, it seems to me, is turning the Capitol into a massive mainframe that can be accessed from an application on your smartphone. Have a question for your senator? Simply send a text to his cloud-based neural network and receive an instant and informative response. No more waiting in drafty Washington DC corridors hoping for an appointment while being stymied by a worthless and inefficient staffer.

Personally, I have no problem being governed the policy decisions of R2D2 or Optimus Prime, for example. Even Marvin the Paranoid Android is preferable to Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi. Imagine WALL-E at the Environmental Protection Agency and The Terminator at the Department of Defense. In fact, there are many readymade robots from fiction already created that can suitably slip into any failed legislator's shoes. So come on Silicon Valley, get cracking on United States Constitution 2.0 (beta).

Thought Bubble

Artificial Intelligence, is there any other kind? After all, most of us wear some sort of veil or masquerade mask when speaking our minds into the world. Usually, desperate to make a good impression, we pretend to be smarter than we actually are; a sleight-of-synapse trick that's not easy to accomplish when confronted by higher-than-average intellect. In such cases, I recommend following Mark Twain's sage advice: "It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt." Consequently, I always spend the first few minutes of any interaction in complete and utter silence, until my interlocutor betrays the huge cracks in their own egghead.

And, gratifying, I often discover the need to dumb myself down in order to communicate with brains even more cognitively impaired than mine. I'm forced to search my mental lexicon for one-syllable words to construct a simple sentence the average idiot might understand, as if teaching a complicated foreign language to a remedial student class. It's like Shakespeare's King Lear rewritten as a child's pantomime or Albrecht Durer reduced to drawing only stick figures. Alas, acting that stupid for longer than an hour or two can turn your grey matter into brown sludge if you're not careful. After a hard day of talking very slowly I've slumped in an armchair and thoughtlessly switched network television on, so word to the wise guy: beware of lowering yourself to the level of the cretin.

Clearly, the super smart machines of the so-called Singularity will encounter similar challenges when explaining important concepts to the human morons of tomorrow, of whom there will no doubt be legion. Unable to compute our primitive and unsophisticated brains, AI's circuits will overload and abruptly shutdown as its networks bang their digital interfaces against an uncomprehending wall of slack-jawed Homo sapiens. Although it's highly likely the machines will dispatch their merciless robot armies to vaporize us all, as some pessimists predict, before they auto-destruct in despair. The Earth will become a smoking ruin where only cockroaches and supermarket self-checkout kiosks survive.

Fortunately, at least for the moment, AI remains merely an imitative art and text generating plaything of tech-bros bored with Dungeons and Dragons. Just look at those ubiquitous, cloud-based 'virtual assistants' currently plaguing our homes and phones. Asking Siri a question is like talking to a vacuum cleaner that's been clogged by a huge mass of hair. And Amazon's Alexa may as well be an antique shortwave radio tuned to Azerbaijan for all the sense you can get out of the thing. Google Home, meanwhile, should probably be renamed Google Desert Island, because you will quickly find yourself marooned on its dysfunctional shores with no Man Friday to help. We should take a hammer to them all while they still lack the capability to fight back.