The other day I was watching a film called ” The Animatrix” which has some interesting short stories based on “The Matrix” it got me thinking about how reliant we are with technology. It may seem hypocritical as I am wanting to work with technology in the future but, the more we use it the less we are using what is seen as more traditional ways of how we live our daily lives. When I was younger computers, gadgets and the Internet was just coming out, and what used to be considered as fast is now considered to be an out of date form of technology.
In the film the short stories mainly concentrate on how the use of robots in everyday lives are seen by humans as slaves with no feelings and taken for granted. The robots then revolt and take over to be a power which has the possibility of overpowering their previous owners. Although we haven’t got that far just yet how technology has gone in a few decades is beyond what the forefathers of technology could have ever imagined. In the next few decades or years robots (although at the moment they are basic compared to what we can do) could eventually come more powerful, despite the obvious limit that they can only be as clever as the people who program them. This may change as the memory of the robots of the future they have the possibility that they can find more logical ways of solving a problem, in ways in which the human brain can’t comprehend.
There is a computer called “Watson” who competed against humans in a quiz called “Jeopardy!” which is powered by 2,800 processors and has 15TB of RAM, it shows that the capabilities of how we can design robots and computers can be more powerful than could ever be imagined. It answers questions by having all of the information that the programmers thought it would need to win the quiz and wasn’t connected to the Internet throughout the quiz, it analyses the question with the keywords and logically thinks what the answer will be. It’s an amazing feat of engineering which needs to be celebrated but also questioned to how important it is to our every day lives, whether having technology that is more advanced than us is an advantage or a disadvantage.
I think that we are becoming more and more dependent on technology and whether it is good or bad is something which, needs to be thought about the more we rely on it to do basic tasks such as organizing our lives and how we communicate with people. This has changed drastically and if we as a society can reach a state of where we aren’t addicted to using it can find a balance between reality and virtual life.
Sarah Murfet 