Saturday 5 April 2014

Artificial Intelligence



Steve took my new little girlie tablet with him to London and so I have been using the old clunker. Now it works OK but somehow it has decided that it will change the screen picture all on its own and it's using pictures of its own choosing. I don't know where they have come from and I certainly am not responsible for them, but they are creeping me out. The machine lulls me into a false sense of security with images of lakes and mountains and then I am assaulted by closeups of what I imagine are underwater fungus scum, or something. I look at these things that I can't identify and am reminded or the horror novel,'Day of the Triffids'. I was a teenager when I read this book, and my imagination was vivid enough to transfer the words on the page to a terror of plants. I think the possibility of these mutant plants taking over the world was and perhaps still is, real enough to cause worry.

So when machines start thinking for themselves, I worry about that too. First it was this old clunky machine - see I need to use a made up adjective in case it does have artificial intelligence and it gets offended and starts electrocuting me. And then when I went to flail my arms around in the pool in the somewhat vain hope that my boob might straighten up, I was forced to go 5 rounds with the pool vacuum. It was taking a little nap on the pool bench so I popped it down onto the floor so it could do some good. Flail flail flail, and bugger me if the bloody thing was not back having a siesta. I moved that thing 5 times before it gave up and started to clean up the leaves. So not only is it a smart arse stubborn machine, it's lazy and doesn't want to work on Saturdays.

I am intrigued by those automatic vacuums that run around the floors all day and suck up dog hair and I reckon that this place would be perfect - concrete and open space, but it would probably be too easy and the thing would get bored and then up to mischief. It would be cool to think that boredom might morph into preparing dinner, but in Stephen King style it would more likely mean some sort of chewing up of Dog or eating all my handbags. I would like to train it to do the ironing when it was done but that would just be being greedy.

Yeh I know this is a silly blog, but it's been a bit of an odd day, and maybe it's the aliens inside my head doing the talking.

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