Ready Writing 1A There is no denying that technology dominates modern life. The cell phone is quite literally everywhere, capable of tracking its owner’s movements. If one ever looked at Google Chrome’s Auto fill settings, it is quite unsettling how much information is known about a person. Name, phone number, address, email. Add a social security number or a credit card and it is an identity thief’s playhouse. Yet as smart as these machines are, they are far from intelligent. All of the power Siri has was given to it by human beings through some clever programming. Today is still a long way off from either a Mr. Data or a terminator. White AI may be a very frightening prospect, it is much less horrifying than modern humans equipped with today’s technology with a malicious intent. As Weiner states humans “may not know, until too late, when to turn it off”. In case of Jurassic Park, the off button should have been pressed before the dinosaurs were made. In the book, Mr. Hammond’s park runs almost entirely on 1990’s computers trying to contain creatures that have not taken breath in 65 million years. As the computer system begins to show problems and the main programmer goes AWOL all of the dinosaurs get loose leading to the deaths of several people including the park’s creator himself. The novel proves the point of “just because one can doesn’t mean one should.” In 1990 computers just were not capable of running a system so large. Indeed the internet barely existed. For example, the Mars Pathfinder website circa 1997 contained six links and required one to go through a menu page (nota drop-down menu like that of the modern age, an actual page just to get where one wants to go) to visit any given part of the site. It shall be interesting to see how such a park fares on modern technology when Jurassic World is finally released. When Norbert Wiener wrote “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation” many of today’s “intelligent machines” did not exist. Wiener did not have dial up let alone LTE’s blowing fast speeds. It would be interesting to get his opinion now, especially on the war machine. In the 1960’s the country was basically off of Truman and Eisenhower’s push for nuclear weapons, which, while very frightening and lethal, could not be launched without human input. Now, Unmanned Aerial Systems such as the Predator can hover above an area for days waiting for an enemy to come out. What happens when such a weapon gets hacked and falls into the wrong hands? Even if a terrorist cell does not manage to bring down a military UAS, civilian drones are fairly easy to make, strap a bomb to, and send off to cause destruction. As shown by the recent gyropter landing on the Capitol lawn, the nation’s capitol city has some serious airspace issues to resolve. A drone is much smaller than any helicopter or airplane and multi-rotor designs are capable of flying as slow as any bird. In such a drone strike, there really can be no way of knowing who to blame until someone tracks it, and there lies the terror. Weiner talks of a “’push button’ nuclear war” which sounds strikingly similar to the movie War Games. In the movie, a boy hacks into a war simulator missile array. While any missile he shoots is hypothetical, the machine’s missile is all to real. Eventually the machine is disarmed by forcing it into an infinite loop during a game of tic-tac-toe, the implications of such a machine and its power to “do anything to win a nominal victory even a the cost of human survival “are worrisome if the military does not pull the plug or indeed have no plug to pull when the time comes.” As frightening a machine like that is, it is still unintelligent. It may be able to “learn” in a sense that it can find the simplest solution, the computer that could threaten humanity would have to be able to think and change its programming to fit its ideals. Such machines are present in the television series “Star Trek: the Next Generation.” In the show, Commander Data, an android, is seen being able to think and at times come up with his own system of beliefs. Yet he is not fully human in appearance. However, during one episode the crew finds a duplicate of Data called lore who’s programming is slightly different allowing him to behave like a human. This frightens the colonist with which he lived so he was dismantled and Data was made. This may be the undoing of any computer wanting to rule the world. Human beings reach a point that if a computer or robot is too humanlike, in either appearance or behavior, they begin to fear it. However, what if people want to be controlled and assimilated into a cyborg/technological society. The cellular phone, while almost always with people is not connected to them. Yet society is moving in that direction. The Apple Watch is the first step, having much of one’s phone’s functions right there on their wrist, but even it can be taken off. What happens when technology becomes a parasite of sorts, feeding off the body’s energy to give one texts directly to the brain. Possibly the more important question is what happens if the server that controls such technology is taken over by a man or machine and an army of stolen bodies is created? While the 1960’s atom bomb was deadly, at least it killed people instead of forcing them to watch their bodies move without their command. In conclusion, while nightmares like AI do cause people to think, they are just that, nightmares. As the saying goes “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Technology is only dangerous when it falls into the wrong human hands. In the year 2015 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 is still just a thing of cinema (unfortunately, so are the spaceships). There is no technology today that is capable of killing off humanity all by itself, and through the careful work of future generations who know when to press the off switch, there never will be. Ready Writing 2A Over thousands of years, humans have experienced several stages of evolution, from the Neanderthals to the Cro-Magnons to the Homo sapiens we are today. However, humans have evolved in more ways than just physically. From the most basic rock tools of the “cavemen” to the mass automation of the Industrial revolution, humans have been using technology to evolve into more sophisticated beings capable of accomplishing more and thinking at higher levels. Today, technology has evolved to a point where machines can basically think much faster and more comprehensively than humans. This has frightened some people, who envision a future of oppressive robot overlords, but if we have this wonderful resource of technology than can think, basically, better, than us then there is no reason we shouldn’t take advantage of it. If humans are cautious in monitoring the capabilities of advanced technology and artificial intelligence, we can use it to evolve into the most sophisticated humans yet. The great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov imagines a future in which humans merge with machines in his short story “The Last Question.” The story presents a series of scenes, each set in a different future time period, in which humans ask their artificially intelligent supercomputer, Multivac, the question, “Can entropy be reversed?” or, in other words, “Can we prevent the universe from ultimately destroying itself?” Each time the question is asked, Multivac has the same answer, “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL RESPONSE.” Over time, the humans in the story evolve alongside Multivac, both human and machine becoming more technologically advanced. Finally, in the last scene of the short story, both humans and Multivac are just consciences floating around in space. The humans ask the question one last time and get the same response before merging with Multivac. Now alone in the universe and possessing all the consciences of mankind, Multivac watches the stars blink away one by one until the universe is nothing more. At last, the answer to “the last question” comes to it, and it proclaims into the nothingness, “Let there be light!” This short story is an extreme, fantastical version of human evolution, in which, after merging with machines, humans become God. Of course, realistically this wouldn't happen, but as machines and humans grow closer together, humans will become more sophisticated and capable of higher levels of thinking, just like Homo sapiens are capable of higher levels of thinking than Neanderthals. When most people think of humans and machines becoming one, they think of humans becoming more and more like machines, not machines becoming like humans. However, this is the case in the Oscar-nominated film, Her. In the film, the main character is a man who lives in a future society dominated by technology in which artificial intelligence plays a huge role in daily life. Each person has an earpiece that they have in at all times, with an artificially intelligent operating system that can answer any questions they have, tell them their schedules, or perform any number of tasks, much like the “personal assistants” built into smartphones today, such as iPhone’s Siri. The main character of the movies purchases a new operating system, the most advanced one yet, and as he talks and listens to “her” (the operating system) all day, he begins to grow very close to her and think of her as another person.