When I was young, there was a task I performed almost every time I visited my grandparents' house. It involved setting the time on their VCR.
Let me explain for those of you who are under 25.... In the 1990s we had these machines that could record television shows using over-sized video tapes. The problem was that they didn't actually know which show they were taping, thereby making the time setting so critical (having a paper copy of a TV Times on hand was also critical).
As I'm doubtful my grandparents ever programmed the VCR to tape a show, I have a feeling their main concern was having a functional clock in the room (back in the day, the VCR served a dual purpose – as both clock and TV recorder).
Obviously, my grandparents were of a different generation, sometimes referred to as the Greatest Generation. You don't get to be called the greatest for nothing. They lived through the Great Depression and World War Two. My grandpa was nearly called to fight in that war, but as the story goes, the war ended just as he stepped onto the plane (or maybe it was just before he parachuted out of the plane...)
Those of the Greatest Generation were fearless and committed – my grandpa volunteered to be in the army like the majority of vets – and were deeply involved in civic society – when there's no Facebook or Netflix, you tend to spend more time outside of the home. They did not tend to be technologically savvy, however; hence the need for their 10-year-old grandson to set the time on their VCR.
Now contrast their generation with my daughter's, those so-called "digital natives." Digital natives are the kids today who grow up with advanced digital technology. They're the ones who have no idea how to actually hold a phone up to the side of their head because all they know is Skype and FaceTime.
My daughter will never understand the complexity of setting the time on a VCR. Our PVR system knows the shows we like and records them. If we want to record a show when we're away from home, we do it on my smart phone. And my smart phone always shows the right time.
In the world of tomorrow (which could literally be tomorrow at the pace things are changing), we're told we'll have smart everything... smart appliances, smart/self-driving vehicles, smart heating/cooling systems, even smart toilets (don't laugh, they already exist!) These machines will work autonomously, sending messages to repair shops when in need of repair and sending orders to Amazon when out of supplies (toilet paper, perhaps?)
These will be wonderful advancements that will largely improve our quality of life. Advances in artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the way things work, greatly improving efficiency and reducing costs, not to mention the immense health and safety benefits.
The only problem I can foresee is that in a world of smart things, we as humans may end up looking... well, dumb.
If you're familiar at all with Moore's Law, you'll understand that it doesn't take long for a computer to advance in speed and memory. Since computers were developed in the 1940s, this law has held to be true: Every two years, the processing power of computers doubles.
At such exponential growth, robots embedded with artificial intelligence are "learning," or increasing computational capacity, at a rate at that makes the human brain appear... well, human.
A computer beat the world chess champion in 1996. IBM's Watson cleaned up in Jeopardy in 2011. And just last year, Google's DeepMind AI beat the world's top-ranked human at the profoundly complex game called Go. It's true these are only games, but most technologists would have never imagined such feats to occur so soon.
These are the first signs of us being outsmarted by the machines we've created. What this means for our future is probably more critical than we think.
To bring it back to the VCR analogy, there may come a point where we need to change the time, but the machines will no longer lets us.
[Cue ominous music...]
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