Rants

Posted on 3 Oct 2007 at 16:03

 

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He's not being paranoid: the machines really are out to get Mel Croucher...

The automatic doors at my local shopping mall are normally very polite. When I approach them, they cringe backwards like hyenas making way for a lion. But last Tuesday, and I assure you I was sober, the automatic doors waited until I was in range and then deliberately punched me in the face.

I had to retire hurt to the nearest computerised toilet, where 50 pence buys you a few minutes of privacy and hygienic solace, but no sooner had I sat on the pan than the vacuum flush thingy tried to disembowel me by sucking my lower intestine through my backside. It was soon after I got back home, when the microwave used its invisible metal-eating rays to explode a silver-rimmed plate, that I realised The Machines are trying to kill me.

Welcome to the future

We've been living in a parallel universe for several generations now, which is why we are not at all surprised to find ourselves here in the future as well as there in the present, both at the same time. Do you remember how the mobile phone was such an instant success when it hit the market? That's because everyone already knew exactly what mobiles were for and how to use them, thanks to years of exposure to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. In fact, most people expected mobiles to be worn on the wrist, as Dick Tracy had been doing since 1931.

But much scarier is the fact that we have all been expecting machines to organise themselves and declare war on humanity since the Cybermen opened hostilities in 1966 and the Terminator gave us the coup de gr? in 1984. Last Tuesday, when The Machines attacked me, I simply wondered what had taken them so long.

People have been getting slashed, mashed, fried, sliced and diced by machines ever since 5th September 1830, when William Huskisson MP was killed by the inaugural train from Liverpool to London. The train was acquitted of murder because Huskisson obviously provoked it by being a Tory. Even the mechanised slaughter of millions in the First World War could not be blamed on the machines, but on the paymasters of the industrial military complex who sanctioned their usage.

The first murder of a human by a machine probably happened in 1981, when a Kawasaki assembly robot went mad and deliberately shoved a hapless repairman into a grinder, but even that homicide was not pre-programmed. Deliberately programming machines to seek out human beings and kill them would only happen in the future. But here I am living in the future, and sentient machines are now being created with the sole intention of committing murder.

Rise of the robots

You are probably expecting me to trot out the Three Laws of Robotics. I won't disappoint you. These simple ethical rules were set out in a short story by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1942, and I had always hoped they would hold good for my lifetime:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

But these laws have not held good for my lifetime. The first armed battlefield robots have already been deployed, by an American administration desperate to stave off further defeat and humiliation. Over four thousand robots are serving in Iraq as you read this, with more legions on duty in Afghanistan. They don't yet look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and go around hunting pregnant women, but I reckon there's a shed-load of boffins in a sealed bunker somewhere who are working on it. Meanwhile, another lot of boffins are cheerfully turning out Smart Bombs that can't tell a wedding party from an arms dump, and if it wasn't for our own soldiers leaking tales of 'friendly fire' on their Star Trek flip-top mobile phones, they would deny responsibility for that, too.