Because that, I understand, is the likely tipping point when the artificial intelligence we are busily creating will exceed human brainpower and begin to wonder just what it needs us for. And so, like the murderous computer HAL in the film, and Frankenstein’s monster before it, the creation will turn on its inventor and try to eliminate us.
Frankly, you only need to sit through the TV news any evening to think: “Who could blame it?”
It is hugely depressing to see human beings murderously on the rampage night after night. Even more so when one reflects how selective broadcasters are in framing the news agenda.
We all know about Gaza. But how many of us had even heard of the Yazidis before last week? How many more unfashionable groups are threatened with equally horrific fates away from the cameras’ gaze?
Some of us fondly imagined that smashing religious symbols and murdering people because of their belief in an alternative (fictional) deity was a relic of centuries past. How very wrong we were.
It would surely be hugely tempting for a superior mind to conclude that there are far too many of us around, with far too many stupid and irreconcilable ideas, and that the world would be a better place without us.
Which would at least put a satisfying end to that popular speculation of my boyhood on the whereabouts of the missing link: the evolutionary stepping stone from ape to man. Perhaps, after all, the missing link is us.
If so, we can only hope the artificial intelligence that succeeds us may see fit to keep a few sample humans in zoos, and that it will be kinder to the surviving apes and other animals than we ever were.
It would be wonderfully ironic if all this came to pass, after the energy we have expended worrying that the world would end in an Ice Age, or a nuclear holocaust, or as the result of global warming. Though of course when we fret about “saving the planet” we don’t really mean the Earth, which can well take care of itself, but the human beings who imagine themselves to be in charge of it.
It was 1968 when I staggered out of the awe-inspiring Cinerama showing of Kubrick’s 2001 at the old Queen’s Hall off Northumberland Street, with Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra ringing in my ears.
That truly was another world, pictured in black and white and priced in pounds, shillings and pence. The Morris Minor was still in production, fridges and freezers were considered luxuries, home entertainment comprised a whole three TV channels and only the richest could aspire to a new-fangled colour set. Mobile phones, home computers and even the pocket calculator simply did not exist.
It was also the first and only year of the twentieth century since 1913 in which no British soldier was killed in action: the briefest of lulls between the end of the last major colonial war in Aden and the onset of the troubles in Northern Ireland.
Yet despite the total absence of most of the technologies we now take for granted, man landed on the moon within a year, using machines with less computing power than today’s mobile handsets.
Raymond Baxter on Tomorrow’s World was must-watch TV for any self-respecting schoolboy, and if I remember rightly we were all looking forward to getting around with individual jet packs and flying cars.
Looking back after the best part of 50 years, I can see that most predictions of the future made in 1968 were total rubbish, while much of the technology we now take for granted was never predicted at all.
It is not unreasonable to hope that forecasts of our demise at the hands of artificial intelligence will prove equally inaccurate.
Still, if you are relaxing in your driverless car in 2029 and suddenly hear the locks click shut and detect a marked acceleration towards the edge of a precipice, please try to remember that you read it here first.
Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.
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