At face value, computers are GREAT. We all love our Macs (thanks, Macaulay!) and we probably couldn’t get by today without a personal computer; our school and work lives are essentially dependent on these machines. The average person interacts with a computer through a graphical user interface (GUI), and consequently never actually experiences the ‘bare bones’ standard input (stdin)/standard output (stdout) interaction with a computer: one that involves only typing on a keyboard (on the user’s part) to result in an output printed on the screen (on the machine’s part). It wasn’t until I started working in terminal and learning how to code that I began to partake in a stdin/stdout interaction with my machine, and in so doing, I caught a glimpse of the infinite potential of a computer’s functionality…and THAT scares me.
Sure, a computer can be limited by RAM, hard drive capacity, etc., but supercomputers and computing clusters can take on challenging tasks that humans could not possibly complete. Asmiov’s Multivac stories echo the common sf trope of fear of artificial intelligence. In The Life and Times of Multivac, Asimov develops the dynamic between Multivac (and the other robots) and humans as a hostile relationship devoid of justice, whereas the reader witnesses the growth and evolution of artificial intelligence alongside the expansion of human civilization to colonies in other galaxies in The Last Question. Here, Multivac undergoes a number of changes, from Microvac to Universal AC to Cosmic AC. The machine comes to embody the minds of humans and transcend space and time by existing in hyperspace.
In my daily computer needs, I am well-aware that my machine is only as smart as I am – any errors I make in stdin (in typing, writing code, etc.) will be propagated by my machine because it simply functions. There is no aspect of judgment in a computer’s actions. But years from now, who’s to say that computers will not have fully realized their potential? Can we ever be sure that human technological innovations will always function for human benefit and under human supervision?
