Imagine to Remember

“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbor, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.”

E.M. Forester, The Machine Stops (1909)

I once had a professor who lectured to us often about the convergence of man and machine and the coming age of technological singularity. This was ten years ago and although I could not begin to imagine what it would mean for our future, I knew it to be true. It filled me with a sense of dread and a gnawing curiosity.

The singularity is the point at which artificial intelligence is expected to surpass human intelligence. It is the point of no return. Its effects will irreversible and will change human civilization. Technologists have a wide range of opinions of how this may manifest. 

The machine is not not ghost, or a boogey man. It is not your friend, it is not innocent. It is not neutral tool in your hands. It is a system made for specific purposes. Whether its designers have nefarious intentions for us or they are just greedy and short sighted, I do not know. 

Whatever we forfeit to the machine, in the name of convenience, comfort and pleasure has a price. At some point the cost maybe too much to bare, if it is paid for with the very things that make us human.

We are as much spiritual as we are physical. We need a direction in which to orient ourselves. If not the heavens above then what? We are worshippers by nature. It is an innate feature of humans. Some will devote themselves to to God, others to idols of their own making, or of someone else’s making. Today to question the machine and its promise of limitless progress is almost a heresy.

S.R.