Where the solution to "the system may _______ a small fee" is the result at the end of a movement that'd be tempting to call bloody Huxleyrious were it not already downright Forsterating.
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One achievable result of industrial technocratic and, accordingly, technological imperialisation is the anthropomorphising of the computer program. It must traverse linguistic steps to set itself in stone, but I think we have arrived, at least insofar as the active voice of that program as reflexive subject — as opposed to the voice of those who code and debug that program — doesn't sound necessarily metaphorical.
If you've ever known the tedium, discussions about acceptable use of your native language with an authority outside the experience can take on an esque-ness, the appellation of which depends on the angle of argumentation, or its forcefulness. What emerges is a declaration of absolutes by the schooled who then do the schooling, or a self-assuredness of comprehension that comes from having mastered a subject at an institution of higher learning, which deems you forever institutionalised. The literary reminiscence is manifold-ian.
This is not a Turing test
In the matter of the pupil to be imperialised, a ruled over trainee shall fill in the blanks to demonstrate a self-assuredness of application of the imperial language, whereby we have moved long past the limey or WALLian taskmaster (Is it just me, or does the word taskmaster scream the onomatopoeic snapping of a pointing stick down upon the pupil being interrogated?) and have come to a place three world empires removed, wherewith the ensuing generations of imperialised taskmasters have assumed their roles in all their de-Duch'd Vichyism.Flooded with bits and pieces as the mind will be, I can't get past this digression: Your returns may vary on deficient interpretation as it relates to how and why any issue currently circulating is "systemic". The system may smack you in the face, but doesn't it still require the long arm of the law and a baton?
Concerns about the dangers that robots pose are misplaced in my opinion. There are concerns, and I find legitimate the concern that people could lose control. Yet here, too, there is a question of how much self-control we've ever been known to exercise in the first place.
So, superfluous is the business of AI taking on a life of its own. It could be that this discussion has been concern-trolled by self-alleged advocates of caution, whose ultimate goals are more concerned with a smoother acquiescence to a brave new boldly going. That's a discussion that entails the hard question of consciousness and a container of snakes whose lid can always be removed to reveal our hard-wired prejudices, the irony of which would be its most thoroughgoing compassionate application adherent to the concept of oneness.
We can forgo disagreements about the supralocality of pseudo-this, meta-that, or the other para-things, because when it comes to the loss of human sovereignty, whether under foot of a robot running amok or via Kafkaesque creations of habits that can't seem to be broken, it is our language that sets the parameters and determines its outcomes. The jackbooted bots 're just following orders.
I wonder whether the personification of the machine extends its potential life or curtails it in the minds of the ones who have received this personification. I wonder how many of us mistake the potential of a housing's being more solid than the frailty of human flesh for a machine that would be in greater solidarity with the system we'd set in motion.
To paraphrase something I've said a number of times: As it relates to the creation of artificial intelligence, robots will not be so lifelike as humans will be robotic, or at least reveal just how robotic we already were, or can yet become, which might include things like only accepting the answer that is programmed.
The system does not charge a small fee. The bank does. And the bank only charges a fee because we have allowed ourselves to say so by way of the process of metonymical personification. But the system? Wohl kaum. Oder doch?
At any rate, we should indeed be concerned about the autonomy of our creations. Not because they'll go rogue, but because their inconsiderateness merely mirrors our own. And when you consider that planned obsolescence is the result of an excess of industrious greed that defines our era, of greatest immediate human concern should be our reliance on things unsustainable.
