Smart fridges may herald tyranny
of machines - expert
Copyright ) 1996 Nando.net
Copyright ) 1996 Reuter Information Service
BIRMINGHAM, England (Sep 12, 1996 10:35 a.m. EDT)
- Smart refrigerators that withhold unhealthy snacks from
dieters may be the first of a new generation of intelligent
machines that will tyrannise humanity, a British engineer
warned on Thursday.
Such a world -- predicted in such science fiction works as
Arthur C Clarke's "2001 -- A Space Odyssey" -- have
been feared for generations, but it is now a real possibility,
Roland Burns of the University of Plymouth in southwest
England said.
"We, for the first time in the whole history of humankind,
are able to make intelligent machines -- machines that
can reason, machines that can make decisions for
themselves," he told the annual festival of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science.
"In the next decade we are going to see the growth of
technology as we have never seen before."
But the gradual takeover of the world will probably start
in the kitchen rather than aboard a spacecraft orbiting
Jupiter, Burns said. He described washing machines that
can decide how much detergent and what temperature
water is needed to wash a load of clothes depending on its
weight.
"I believe that the new generation of machines will be
taking far more strategic decisions in all aspects of our
lives," he told a news conference ahead of his presentation.
"I think it is more or less inevitable. We have this
momentum in intelligent machine design which will be
difficult to stop," Burns added. "Business and science will
drive this technology to the utmost."
The new technology may show up first in the home.
"I think there's going to be a revolution there," he said,
describing a "smart fridge" programmed to read bar codes
on food products as they are loaded in.
"Your home management system will know every item of
food brought into the house," he said. Plugged into both
your bank and the computer at the local supermarket, it
will order and pay for food as it is needed.
"It will detect the sort of things that you eat and the sort of
things you enjoy eating, making very intelligent, very
reasoned, very non-emotional decisions on our behalf," he
said.
But reasoned decisions may not be benevolent, he added.
"They are very cold, calculating devices."
Instead of being a "guardian angel whom you can trust" it
could become a tyrant, withholding chocolate bars from
dieters, and perhaps even deciding to go so far as deciding
that humans are inefficient and thus locking its owner out
of the house.
"The worst that could happen is that there will be a race of
machines that we will be subservient to."
New technology that allows computers to think for
themselves, rather than following clumsy line-by-line
commands, will make the difference.
"In the past these machines have behaved in a way we
programmed them to," Burns said. "They are now capable
of learning."
Burns himself is working on prosthetic limbs and
described an artificial arm that can "decide" which finger
a user wants to move based on nerve signals.
It uses neural networks -- the newest generation of
computer design that allows the machines to work in three
dimensions as the brain does, instead of in a single line.
This makes computers much faster and more efficient.
"It can learn from its environment and it can learn from its
past."
Many of the advances were being made by military
engineers, designing aircraft that can be guided only with
the help of an on-board computer. But such inventions
could easily translate into civilian life.
Automobiles that navigated using satellite guidance, that
can use microprocessors to avoid accidents, will be among
the first. "The intelligent machine will coolly and calmly
collect all the data, microsecond by microsecond, and
make all the necessary adjustments to steering and brakes,"
he said.