Staying in control

The basic technological driver of all this is the growing technical capacity and declining costs of digital systems, ultimately driven by Moore's Law which says that processing power doubles every 12-18 months. The basic economic driver is the desire by employers to replace expensive and hard to control humans with machines or digital systems.

But as we hand over the work to these systems, at what point do we lose control over our own lives? The issue of machines deciding life and death is clearly the literal cutting edge, but there are other critical concerns as well.

For instance, as we automate jobs all sorts of skills and knowledge sets are lost. As such, it will be increasingly difficult to even figure out what is happening with systems that are constantly developing because there won't be any humans who retain enough expertise. The essential information of our modern culture is steadily shifting into a cybernetic substrate and away from human awareness.

Perhaps the best example is the central role of the Internet in everyday life. The Internet is an incredibly complex arrangement of hardware and software that is now vital to all sorts of activities. The Internet is also incredibly vulnerable and could suffer catastrophic failure any time. For starters, parts of the physical infrastructure are particularly vulnerable to accidental or deliberate disruption. The software is even more vulnerable to disruption by hacking.

The people who actually run the Internet live in abject fear of some genius fifteen year old from Manila crashing the net with a super-virus he made up for fun, or some Eastern European crime gang doing it for the money. So far this has only occurred in partial ways, but the security people know how close we are to such a disaster.

One of the common concerns is that the frenetic growth of the Internet has not allowed consolidation of core systems and software. The money is in pushing capacities farther and faster, not going back and making it all sturdier and safer. The Y2K bug was a reminder of what could go wrong.

There is a basic question of competence here: can humans even maintain real control over our increasingly complex systems? In their open letter the AI expert group have said that handing over real time decision making over life and death to machines is a step too far, but we are moving in the same direction in many less dramatic ways. Jet airliners can now operate without pilots, and we are about to shift into driverless car traffic systems. We are all increasingly passengers in our own lives.

And it is a two way process: as our machines get smarter, we human beings get less capable and we become ever more dependent on them. And the very same digital technology is generating more ways of distracting ourselves, from IPads to virtual reality systems. As we lose capability in real world situations, we become ever more involved in our ever more intricate cyberspace worlds.

This basic logic, of growing technological capacity and declining human capacity, has been played out in many books, movies and TV shows because popular culture has a way of picking up the main themes of any era. For instance, right now there are plenty of movies concerned with these ideas, from the latest Terminator film to a subtle little piece called Ex Machina. These movies are of interest exactly because we fear that we are on the cusp of losing control over our own technological creations.

Eventually, probably very soon, we need to ask ourselves what life is about anyway. Is it about removing all threats, even as we create new ones, and just living easier, better entertained lives? Or is it about living in ways that nourish us physically, emotionally and intellectually, and enable us to become in some sense morally better people?

The people behind the open letter from Buenos Aires think we should not allow machines to decide to kill human beings. This would not just be the ultimate power for machines, but also the ultimate denial of responsibility by human beings.