By 
By Paul Moore
Science fiction is awash with stories of machines coming alive, having gained sentient intelligence, and taking over the world.
The continuing acceleration of artificial intelligence has heightened that concern for almost everyone combining it now with the notion that we will all end up without employment. I try to counter this, particularly with students, by asking them whether that might not be a good idea.
Many would be happy not to have to work every day. If machines were doing all the work that none of us wish to do would that not let us get on with things we do want to do, like sport, or hobbies, or community work – whatever. But where does the money come from they will ask? If the machines are doing the work then money must still be made and that can be distributed on an equal basis, not unlike the basic income being given to artists in Ireland. But does that not sound a bit like socialism? Indeed it does and the flaw is that the billionaires of this world might want to keep all the money the machines earn so a strategy will have other be found to stop them. At this point the students are on their own.
I work sometimes with a film maker, what you might term a futurist. He maintains that science fiction no longer exists, because if we can think it than we can make it. Thinking things into existence seems like the ultimate science fiction until you start to examine some of your own behaviours, or, at least, the behaviours of the machines around you. For example I have a friend who is having a house renovated.
She went there last week and walked around the building with the construction company owner talking about where windows should go, what floors should be ripped up, tiles, bathroom fittings and so on, all the joys of a large scale refurbishment. She was horrified to find, over the next few days, that her Instagram feed was consumed with advertising for building materials and builders, a constant barrage of the very things she had been speaking about a few days before. The only conclusion possible is that her phone was also listening to the builder and it with no intention of paying for anything.
I have seen articles claiming that air fryers which use an app are listening to what goes on in the home and on a personal level I am fairly convinced that Alexa knows more than she should about my private life. As if on cue another story this week indicated the folly of buying gadgets which use an app for their supposed efficiency.
A French tech worker living in Barcelona, who is an avid gamer, decided to see if he could programme his robot cleaner with his games controller. This was apparently simple enough because of the existence of an app which allowed him to switch it on from anywhere in the world. Having done so he was astonished to find that he immediately had access, via camera, to seven thousand other devices, and, more importantly, the entire goings-on of seven thousand other homes. He had a full visual map of all the rooms and had he wished he could even have spoken through the microphone to anyone in those rooms.
There is of course a simple fix: Cover up the camera on the cleaner. In fact, paranoid or not, I have taken to covering up the camera on all my devices, including this laptop on which I am typing. Of course the one device I do not do this on is – the phone. Duh!
