The Robot Uprising is already happening. And Humans want it bad.

     The robot uprising is a great plot point for science fiction writers. The astounding rate at which technology has advanced in my lifetime has me philosophical about what could be coming next. I have spent some time toying with the idea of artificial intelligence, (I totally intend to write a sci-fi novel someday) and with all my research and brainstorming, I came to the terrifying realization that one could easily make the argument that the technological singularity has already occurred. (I am not alone in this, thousands of people discuss it through social media daily)

    For those of you who don't know, the technological singularity, usually just called the singularity, is the theoretical point at which technological advancement becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, forever changing the course of human society. So when exactly the singularity will happen (or happened) depends on your definition of technology. Most consider that moment to be the birth of AI, the moment when technology can act truly independent from any human influence. But I have also read arguments stating the singularity occurred the moment man first used a tool to till the earth.

This is a picture of the most advance artificial intelligence (so far), Sophia. Please note, they gave her (it) a human name and face.

    

    I think that humanizing the robots we create makes us feel more at ease with what we are doing. I can imagine its a lot easier to work to improve this gentile, feminine looking husk than if it looked like Ultron from Marvel. (BTW, the Avengers movie totally botches Ultron's origin story, but I digress) I recently noted something like this happening in my own home.

    My wife recently bought a Roomba vacuum. It is an extremely useful piece of technology, and our house has been noticeably cleaner since it was set up. But I also noticed my wife and kids (heck maybe even me to an extent) have been treating this vacuum like it's another dog. They affectionately watch it go about it's business while commenting things like "There he goes!"  or "Uh oh, he's stuck!"

    

    How the vacuum was determined to be male, I don't know. But more important, this is not something the manufacturer put upon us. No owner's manual or marketing ploy gendered this vacuum. We did it ourselves, to make ourselves feel closer to the vacuum. 

 

One of these will suck up anything you drop on the floor and improve every aspect of your life. The other is a vacuum.

    As consumers continue to demand technology that takes more and more tasks from our daily lives, what we don't realize is that we are becoming more and more dependent on these machines. Our every day activities are changing to accommodate these computers. I realized to my chagrin that I was doing this to my car. Our Subaru Forester has a new feature called the driver monitoring system. It is a safety feature they invented that gives you little beeps and warnings if it catches you doing something like looking at your phone, or looking into the backseat while moving.

    

    This radically reduced the amount of texting while driving my wife used to do, which is magnificent, but the other day I realized that I had actually changed my posture while I drive to get fewer of these notifications from the damn car. I actually changed the way I sit, the way I hold the steering wheel because a piece of software told me to. I now turn off that particular feature when I drive.

 

    The next terrifying step in technology is closer than you think. My brother-in-law, Canuckis Maximus (as always, names have been changed to protect those who claim to be innocent) pointed this one out to me. The next step in technology will of course be installing these devices inside humans.

    Think back to the 90s. If someone said they were going to put a computer chip into you, you would be horrified. It is the exact kind of thing conspiracy theorists have been spouting since the invention of computers. In fact, I once worked for a company called BioScience Laboratories, and as it turned out there was a conspiracy locally that in our labs we were chipping people for the government. (we weren't doing anything that cool.)

    These days however, people are lining up to volunteer as test subjects for this kind of technology. Elon Musk, the well known tech guru and richest man on earth, has a company called Neuralink dedicated to researching how to communicate telepathically with machines through chips in your brain.

This is not photoshop. This is real, and voluntary.

    And so to my final thoughts. In 1996, a domestic terrorists by the name of Ted Kaczynski (better known as the Unabomber) was caught after almost 20 years of bombings. He left behind stacks and stacks of coded journals laying out a manifesto decrying the advancement of technology and the loss of human independence. That was nearly 30 years ago.

    

    I've seen the manifestos of mad men (not first hand, research. I swear I'm not crazy) and they always come off as rambling and insane. But if you look at the stuff Ted Kaczynski was writing, not only is it disturbingly coherent for someone that did the things he did, it paints a very bleak picture of the future we are running into.

    I think that we have already passed the singularity. We have already reached a point that we cannot function without the technology we integrated into our everyday life. Put your smart phone away for a week and prove me wrong.