By Tom Kirkham
US inventor Ray Kurzweil has this week courted controversy by predicting that machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029.
However, given the amount of people now regularly following television programmes such as “I’m a Celebrity…” and “X-Factor”, frankly I think Mr. Kurzweil is being rather conservative in his estimation… Surely robots will be able to match the intelligence of your average reality TV viewer a lot sooner than that??!
OK, I’m being facetious, but it does scare me that while machines continue to get smarter at an alarming rate, an increasing proportion of the public seems content to spend every evening observing former models and washed-up pop singers writhing around in tanks full of creepy-crawlies, or watching George Galloway pretending to be a cat.
I recognise the value of a little mindless escapism – the problem is, it’s not just our light entertainment programmes that are being dumbed down. Sections of the media seem to be suffering the same fate. I live in a city where approximately 861,000 people each day now read a free paper that has seemingly as much in common with Heat magazine as it does with a newspaper. What’s more, a further 858,000 people read its rival, even though it appears to be exactly the same!
In contrast, the most recent statistics show that national broadsheet readership remains in decline – only The Independent has recorded a rise in daily readership, though has the smallest audience of the nationals anyway. While the shift towards online media may offset this, typing 'Britney Spears' into Google News still brings up a lot more entries than 'Darfur' or 'Northern Rock'.
Ray Kurzweil believes that machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health – certainly an astonishing claim. I’m just worried that in years to come, if anyone still wants to interview a leading thinker like Mr. Kurzweil, they’ll be more likely to ask him what’s on his iPod rather than to outline his vision of Dalek-like man-machines.
Yes, I absolutely recognise that, to a large extent, the media works by providing exactly what their respective audiences want to read. But at some point you have to ask, is it really going to take putting nanobots into people’s brains to make them realise that a Paris Hilton wardrobe malfunction probably isn’t as important as the political crisis in Kenya or the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state?
And if the nanobots do in fact achieve human-level artificial intelligence, you'd suspect they’d raise a pretty strong objection to being implanted in the first place!
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