Professor Stephen Hawking this week predicted that Artificial Intelligence will eventually kill us all. This dark proclamation got me thinking about an old 'friend' I abandoned in the attic a decade ago, the toy robot called PINO. Having tried to 'care' for him I was literally anguished by his constant mewling like a stricken kitten. This is how he was advertised on TV.
The thought that PINO, boxed up in my loft with his limited but untested intelligence, is hatching a plan to take over the world does give me the creeps. Even worse is the notion that all the worlds' PINO's possess a single hive mind and are working invisibly together on some evil scheme.
It calls to mind Yeats's line
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
and HG. Wells'
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
When I look at ASIMO, Honda's cutting-edge adult version of PINO, I see that he is no longer a toy. At first he could go down stairs, something the Daleks could never do. As technically dazzling as it was, I had a simple coiled toy that could do the same in the Sixties called, rather robotically, SLINKY.
But now ASIMO serves drinks, shakes hands, plays football, hops and most disquietingly of all, watches humans and follows their facial expressions.
I suppose it was inevitable that one of our toy robots would grow up and become a reality. Of all the thousands of toy robots produced since the Fifties I didn't expect it to be PINO. Maybe its because they are more humanoid than most, made to be more than a simple toy.
This idea has been a staple of Sci Fi for years. Brian Aldiss's "Supertoys last all Summer Long", springs to mind, where android children take the place of real ones in a world of controlled childbirth. Kubrick filmed it as AI, an essentially sad movie suggesting that supertoys will outlive us all. David, no longer a mere robot toy, becomes a boy, enduring the loss of childhood in a lifeless, parentless world forever.
We all miss our childhoods and collecting toys is a way of keeping some of the spark alive. In a way our Action Men and Zeroids have grown up with us and may indeed outlive us. Should they ever be imbued with artificial intelligence I hope they enjoy childhood as much as we did and remember the sparkling lights of Christmas before plotting to kill us all!
What do you think readers?
