Small Black Screens Are Your Only God Now

Are we ignoring the demise of humanity that’s right in front of our faces?

Photo: Artyom Kim/Unsplash

My mom let me watch two rated “R” movies well before people in the 1980s and 90s would have deemed my age appropriate. The first was Rambo, but that was because I was already watching the Saturday morning Rambo cartoon and playing the Nintendo video game. The second was Terminator 2: Judgement Day (or T2 as it became abbreviated).

T2 still ranks among the top 100 movies on IMDb and is within my top favorites. For the uninitiated, the storyline involves artificially aware robots sent back in time to murder the leader of the human resistance, John Connor. In T2, a machine reprogrammed by the human resistance (played by the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger) goes back in time to protect Connor from another Terminator.

Throughout the narrative, John Connor, his mother, and the good Terminator (Schwarzenegger) seek to destroy a company named Skynet working on machine learning and AI. In the distant future, Skynet gives way to self-aware robots who launch nukes in an attempt to destroy humanity. This kicks off a dystopian future where humans and machines fight each other.

In the 1990s, T2 was science fiction. But, self-aware robots and machine learning are no longer fantasy. There are videos of robots who can exhibit facial expressions that reach such a level of creepy; you’d swear Skynet is already well underway. Even tech guru, Elon Musk, has warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence. However, what disturbs me the most about our scientific advancements is the pregnant question we all seem to ignore.

I’ve often wondered aloud to friends whether “Skynet is already here, self-aware, and destroying us?” When asked to explain, I point to social media and media conglomerates. To simplify our lives and curate customized content, we created algorithms to serve up articles, videos, information, misinformation, and amusement that keep us endlessly entertained. Algorithms are — in their most basic form — machine learning. The issue is that we’ve gotten the content we’ve yearned for, but now it’s destroying us. Polls show people believe things are getting worse, and — for all the talk of us being more enlightened than our predecessors —…