The good news tonight is that the infection rates in Crosby are now lower than they were a month ago and still falling faster than expected. At this rate the infection rate will be bellow 20 by Christmas week. And that is without taking in to account lockdown and the mass testing trial.
Tonight I decided to watch the 1994 film True Lies. In it they have all this cool futuristic tech, Now, 25 years later, this tech is commonplace. Retina and fingerprint scanning, voice adjustment etc. It reminded me of the original Star Trek series and the tech it portrayed, like the communicator/flip phone lookalike. Or the data pads.
The original moon landing had a computer that some compare to a commodore pet. When you dig in to it the commodore looks high tech compared to the one actually used. Technology is moving forward at an amazing rate.
But what about the tech in other films HAL from 2001 a Space Odyssey? A computer that controls so much of the space ship that it can defend itself against humans (if you want to know where the name HAL came from try moving each letter one forward in the alphabet)? Does this sound similar to Skynet?
So how long will it be before we see the first computer caused deaths? We have already seen one in Tempe Arizona when an Uber car hit a pedestrian. Of course this was during a trial and the failure of a person to stop the car is important. But as self drive cars become more regular there may well be a point where a car must decide to kill somebody because there are limited options, all of which result in deaths (the trolley problem). A pedestrian steps in front of a self drive car and it is impossible to stop in time. So does it swerve to miss the person? What if swerving was likely to kill the driver? How would the computer decide who to kill? I know – crazy problem, not likely to occur. But you can’t stop the car and programme it at the time, so the ability to make this decision needs to be incorporated into the car programming. Not including it in the programming is actually programming the car to ignore the balancing of lives.
And there we have it – we are maybe a couple of years away from a computer being able to decide between who will die. Are we happy with that? As a society are we ready?