Automatic Life

Today I had a Dream (not that kind of dream, mind you). I somehow modified my car (A.K.A. "The Panzer", see this) that allowed it to drive me to work and/or hell college while I was comfortably sitting in the front passenger's seat. The implementation of such a system is left as an exercise to the reader. It involved a radar, some pretty sadomasochist programming and a whole lot of heavy wizardry. The system worked mostly flawlessly, except in locating the semaphores (like many humans do) but it was solved with some witty hack involving the radar and some sick calculations with the flow of the other cars (with the obvious shortcomings when there are no cars). The point is, I got stopped by a transit officer due to the fact that no one was driving my car at the moment, even if my car was handling the transit better than all the motorized monkeys the other human beigns in the beginning.

So, this brings 2 things to my mind:

1. What the hell did I eat in yesterday's dinner?
2. How would humanity take it if we suddenly created machines that could really do something useful like waking me up and taking me to work everyday (harder than you may think) and giving me some real support on any kind of mad crusade I may get into.

What if I replaced my trusty T|X with a machine that noticed that I am hammering out some code and helpfully provided me with the documentation I seem to be needing but as a lazy person refuse to search... without me telling it to do it. We are not talking real AI here, just some context mapping and some guesswork. Apart from the obvious Clippy feeling (they say they have been trying to kill it since some recent version of office, but the bastard just keeps respawning), wouldn't my life be more... productive, perhaps?

My personal bet is in the range of [Hell Yeah!] and [Duh], and would be happy to get one. But I'm not sure about the rest of humanity. See, as the monkey-descended apes we are, we like gadgets, flashy stuff and women in their 20s with big boobs. But nothing more that that, people would start complaining that their devices stop them from being creative, that somehow these devices are trying to control their life. [Insert some crazy conspiracy theory here]

The problem here is that these devices are stupid, they just have a magical way of finding out what you are doing and offer you some help (you just programmed it way back with the necessary tools, nothing more). There is no real reasoning or self-awareness going on here, there is no Judgement-Day coming, just PDA v. 2.0. Wouldn't that fear be better directed at the fact that the future of this world is in the hands of a group of monkeys that just need to press a Big Red Button for it to be over with?

This would last for about 1 generation, then the next generation would embrace it and really kick off the technology. But the current generation would still see them as evil things, because we are afraid of change.

Why are we afraid of change? because change is uncomfortable, change brings risks, change brings change. (note the recursion)

We tend to accomodate ourselves to our boring everyday lives, we say that we are tired of doing the same thing every day, but if something comes and tries to change it we stand out and defend that same boredom. It's just like bad laziness (see my previous post).

Wouldn't it be nice if we could stop being lazy and embrace change?