In Brian Sack’s spoof the women is blissfully tech free! She is unencumbered by smart phones, GPS systems and social media. Of course navigating by map, she did encounter a few problems en route to the studio which will have long-lasting repercussions. On the bright side, the lucky lady is exempt from tweets and Facebook notifications, who knows how many years she will save – when the minutes spent taking ‘selfies’ to update social media are tallied?
Not so funny are warnings from a group of Cambridge scholars, who make me wish we could all turn back the clock and follow the woman in the video above. Okay, so I can’t figure out how to play a movie in my own dvd player. There are much more pressing reasons for halting the technical revolution. The scientists are examining ‘existential risks’ or catastrophic risks to our species that are “our Fault” in the sense that they arise from human technologies. Some feel that the human species may become extinct within the next century. A zoologist in the group feels that the risk of a designer bacteria produced by ‘error or by terror’ in the nearby future may be well worth worrying about. I tend to worry with him. Humans are accident prone creatures. Add to that the number who crave biological methods of destroying their enemies, and it will be miraculous if our species emerges unscathed.
Barring a natural catastrophe such as a mega earthquake or an asteroid, these scientists believe it’s likely that our technology may essentially follow the predictions of Science fiction writers, as is often the case. They see a time when machine intelligence may reach a tipping point, when it could take over its own process of improvement, perhaps exponentially, so that we humans would soon be left far behind. Hello…Hal?