Page 48 - NAMAH-Apr-2022

Namah Vol. 30, Issue 1, 24th April 2022

Meanwhile the undeserving can be educated coal into steam engines. They breathed an air
to become deserving of such a power. And like laden with coal dust, lived in ghettos without
all education, it is an awakening. Since I worked running water and toilets. But they had hope,
in the technical field for many years and had a which sustained them. Hope that someday
chance to look at artificial intelligence from up they’d be able to ride on these steam engines
close, I would like to share some observations. and go on holidays. Man does not see the
preposterous end to which he is being drawn
Mechanisation by his own inventions. The underprivileged
are working longer hours making the ever
The companies that created ecommerce software multiplying machines work, competing with
in the 1990s were at the cutting-edge then. No machines that are outsmarting them, and
more waiting in queues in the bank, watching on the whole leading a miserable life. And
tellers fumble with keys and cash. No more this includes white-collar jobs like software
begging for a loan, no more going to a store engineers, who are handsomely paid but have
where your article is just out of stock. Of course, little stress-free time and energy to go on
some people, figured out how to rob banks holidays or philosophise.
over the Internet, but that did not displace
the ecommerce gods. Then the superpowers Maybe there is a privileged class that’s
descended and took over the earth. We call enjoying the gifts of mechanisation without
them Artificial Intelligence and they have many being slaves to it. All they have to do is click
of us lying prostrate at their feet. For us humans mouse buttons and utter commands like
surrendering to machine gods is an old habit. “Alexa, start, Alexa, stop”. But what does
We have always believed in magic and the such a lifestyle do to a person’s psyche? It
lesser we had of it the more we yearned for not only makes him lazy, anti-social, and
it. When the phonograph replayed our voice, impatient with humans, but it makes him
it was magic. When we could talk to a person a heartless machine. Machines deliver our
miles away, it was magic. When we could see vegetables, cook our food, wash our clothes,
them, it was magic. Every year we started dishes, homes and cars. They massage us,
getting new magic, and now every month we play music for us, and show us dance videos.
get them. With virtual reality there will really be a
charming girl dancing before us; only she
Consequences of mechanisation would not be dancing for us exclusively. And
then we’d realise with some regret, she’s
But not all people get favours from the real, and we are real, but our interaction is
machine gods. Ever since the industrial fake. She isn’t even there in front of you, she
revolution two classes were born. One used is in a studio doing her routine in exchange
the products made by machines, the other for money for whoever can afford her.
ran the machines. Individual entrepreneurs How sad is that? Poets in the past repaired
became factory workers. Instead of weaving themselves to taverns to repair themselves
their own cloth with handlooms, they fed of such impertinences. People in the present
cotton into textile machines. Instead of pair themselves with devices that cure their
shovelling hay to their horses, they shovelled impertinence with some other impertinence.

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