Excellent. I’d been searching for this for ages, and now I’d found it, all that was left was to order it. Just enter the payment method and click…hang on, what’s this? A small box appeared on the screen, headed with the caption TICK TO CONFIRM YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT. Granted, my moving parts do feel a little more likely to seize up these days, and my tired brain does occasionally feel as though a few wires have managed to get themselves crossed in there somehow, but a robot I am not. Tick.
A few days later I was trying to log in to an online account and those crossed wires started to spark up once again, leaving me with a forgotten password. I clicked on the ‘reset password’ link only to be faced by a picture broken down into a grid of squares, above which was written the caption ‘Please click on all boxes containing pictures of buses’. Really? What was this, some kind of pre-school aptitude test? Quickly, though, the old mental circuitry began working properly once more and I realised that this was yet another of those humanity tests.
What on Earth is going on? I thought to myself, imagining, in some Asimov or Clarke-flavoured daydream, armies of robots tapping away at computer keyboards and tablet screens, scanning the internet for any scrap of useful information that can be gathered in the pursuit of overthrowing their human overlords. Aside from the realms of science fiction however, I began to wonder if all this was really necessary; after all, we don’t need to prove our humanity, right?
Using terminology I understand, I would rate my computer literacy as C+ – solid enough, but with plenty of room for improvement – so I started to look into my daydream a little, just to see how far off the mark I actually was. Immediately, I discovered that I wasn’t that far off the mark at all, a simple internet search leading me to a description of ‘bots’.
These little virtual creatures, on first glance, aren’t actually that far removed from science fiction narratives, with sub-categories including such frighteningly named creatures as ‘web crawlers’ and ‘scrapers’, enough to give anyone a chill. However, just beneath the creepy-crawly surface of this pixelated nightmare, the reality is even more disturbing, and far closer to the truth than I’d realised. Apparently, these bots imitate online human behaviour, scanning sites and carrying out any number of actions, only they actually do it more accurately and faster than we do, making me feel somewhat like an obsolete bag of flesh and bone. Sounds a bit of an overreaction? Well, one of the functions of bots that we most obviously encounter on a daily basis is chatting with visitors to websites, so that helpful person with whom I talked briefly online about my boiler issues the other day was actually not a helpful person at all, but a virtual entity with no concrete existence whatsoever.
The conversations over artificial intelligence are nothing new, despite their rapid advancements in recent years. I can still recall the furore over a quarter of a century ago, when chess grand master Gary Kasparov was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue computer, the first time a chess master had been defeated by a programme in this way. However, rather than being the binary opposition it was back then, the lines between reality and virtual reality these days are far more blurred.
When walking the corridors of the school in which I work, I often hear pupils talk at break and lunch times of their gaming experiences and arranging with their friends to meet online after school, purposely to inhabit different identities in alternate worlds, leaving reality far behind for a few hours.
Adults, too, often prefer the online world to the real one. Social media, whilst it can be a good thing that connects loved ones separated by commitments and great distances, is also used as a way to alter and twist the shape of reality. Don’t like the way you look? There’s a filter that can help with that. Not keen on that element being in your photo? There’s a filter for that too. There are phones with camera software that can easily and effortlessly remove objects and even people from photographs before they are even shared, altering forever those individual moments in time that occur only once then are gone forever, thus changing the narrative of time as it unfolds. Of course, this works the other way, even crossing over into reality to alter peoples’ image in the real world. So many make up techniques and minor forms of cosmetic surgery look nothing less than strange in real life yet, when captured in a photograph and subjected to those famous filters, make a person seem fresh-faced and totally renewed.
AI is now even at the point where very realistic and convincing images of places and people can be reproduced easily. I’ve seen countless pictures of country scenes and beautiful rooms in amazing houses that exist nowhere but the virtual confines of cyberspace, but the technology goes even further than this. Renditions of actual peoples’ voices, pieced together from audio snippets harvested from numerous other sources, can be realistically rendered and used to create messages that shouldn’t even exist as they were never uttered by the person in question.
If all of this isn’t enough, then maybe the new MSG sphere in Las Vegas is the venue for you. Costing $2 billion, it utilises thousands of speakers, LED panels and haptic seats to give the visitor a completely immersive, wraparound experience that totally detaches them from everyday life. The visitor can find themselves in the middle of a concert, a vast undersea cave with sun shafts penetrating to the ocean’s murky depths above them, or even take a virtual yet realistic tour of the world without getting out of their seats, rendering the line between real life and the imagination almost non-existent, a thought that makes me feel like I need a lie-down, or perhaps to tick a box or two.
