Can Al Teach Our Grandmothers To Suck Eggs?

Louis Tempany wonders whether the problem is with the machines or with us.

- By Louis Tempany

To put the title question into more straightforward words, will human life become so diminished that we will require machines to do everything for us? Will human life get to a stage where things we ought to know how to do – like egg-sucking, say – are being done by inanimate objects instead of us?

As far back as the nineteenth century scholars attempted to predict what technological progress we might make. Progress looks incredible in cartoonist William Heath Robinson's satire on it – far brighter than reality. There's plenty to marvel at: the mechanised steam mega-horse with smoking nostrils; the vacuum tube that transports you to Bengal; the mobile water dispenser... While some of these ideas may have come to fruition, most others are simply amusing and lack any kind of characteristics that modern machines possess. But even back then we feared that machines might someday overpower us. The In The Year 2000 images were commissioned from artist Jean-Marc Côté by a French toymaker for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, becoming famous when Isaac Asimov republished them eighty-six years later. Fritz Lang's vision of the year 2000 in his silent film Metropolis, released in 1927, is also completely unsettling – though it was laughed off at the time as a 'silly' and 'farfetched' idea of humankind's future.