Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.
They say robot technology will swallow everyone in the end.
Why, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak once even declared that humans will merely be robots’ pets.
Surely, though, robots won’t be able to do everyone’s jobs.
They won’t be able to dribble like Lionel Messi or talk nonsense like a congressperson, will they?
They won’t be able to create anything, unless it’s a miserable dystopia, will they?
And if they do, we’ll just switch them off like a TV, won’t we?
Won’t we?
It’s easy to chuckle about all this.
Currently, robots can do little but let Russians infiltrate elections and post scurrilous things on Twitter.
I mean, look at them. They can’t even open doors.
Except, well, oh.
Scared yet?
This is Boston Dynamics’ latest robot creation.
It’s thoroughly, blood-curdlingly nerve-shivering. To a human, at least.
Yes, these robots walk like metal dressage horses.
They make so much noise that, well, the U.S. Marines decided during trials that they’d alert the enemy a little too quickly.
But never imagine that you’re immune from this version of progress.
Never conclude that there isn’t someone out there desperate to replicate human activity, with a view to replace it.
Just to see what it would be like, you understand.
It’s worth remembering that there are those in Silicon Valley desperate to see Roboworld.
Google’s director of engineering Ray Kurzweil insists that within 15 years, we’ll all be robot-human hybrids, with chips in our heads.
He believes we’ll be “godlike.”
His idea of joyous paroxysm is for the chip in his brain to make him funnier.
“Let’s say I’m walking along and I see my boss at Google, Larry Page, approaching,” he once explained. “I have three seconds to come up with something clever to say, and the 300 million modules in my neocortex won’t cut it. I need a billion modules for two seconds. I’ll be able to access that in the cloud just as we can access additional computation in the cloud for our mobile phones, and I’ll be able to say exactly the right thing.”
Exactly the right thing.
Because, in life, there’s only one right thing to say.
For tech types, there’s always a right answer.
The problem is that they believe they’re the right people to deliver it.
Psst, there’s a dog coming. It’s opening the door.
Turn around, open the door and run.