Eamon Dyas
Musk predicts that within 5 years, apps, email, etc. will all be gone, replaced by AI
Everything will be generated by AI on your device (formerly known as a “phone”), delivering everything it thinks and decides you want or need to your screen – Elon Musk
1.5-min clip from a Joe Rogan interview with Musk
Elon Musk: Apps Will Disappear in 5 Years #science #space #podcast
July 26
Eamon Dyas:
Beyond the orbit of family and friends the way that most people relate to other people is through links established by the market with shopping being the most common one.
The possibilities opened by the internet has made even that link less prevalent. A person can now procure any manufactured item or service without leaving their home simply be pushing a few keys on their smartphone. And even the decisions involved in that effort have now been overtaken by the online service provided by the large supermarkets. These supermarkets, whose IT systems can now identify the patterns of your purchases if you use credit or debit cards (or even cash purchases if you use their loyalty card to take advantage of discounts) from week to week and they retain that data so that they can replicate those purchases for delivery to your door should you request it.
With systems like Siri also available in the home that can answer – via a speaker or on your phone – a whole range of questions that might previously have been part of a real life interaction with other human beings while also being capable of performing simple physical tasks like turning on the lights or central heating, the range of activities involving contact with other humans is contracting all the time.
This is now being compounded by the development of humanoid robotic systems where even the visual appearance of humans is being imitated in ways that seek to supply the normal need for emotional comfort through the visual presence of other humans. There’s currently a comedy series on BBC iPlayer called Ann Droid which humorously explores this situation. The plot of the series revolves around the decision of the inept son of a widowed woman who does not wish to go into a home and cannot afford home care, to lease a re-conditioned robot from a company that specialises in supplying such a service. Looking at this programme in view of the progress made in this area it seems like a scenario that is now no longer far fetched.
Technology that has developed so fast under the stimulus and direction of the market has remoulded our humanity along lines that reduce us into ever-decreasing individual pieces of existence whose only worth is as consumers. Without wishing to fall into an over-poetic mode it reminds me of those dying stars that contract into ever-smaller spaces and assume an ever-heavier density until they eventually explode; it seems to me that we are being made into Gods for a while but the price we really pay comes with the loneliness that inevitably comes with that role.
Frederick Engels noticed the early inklings of this on seeing London for the first time but what he witnessed then has grown into something that even he could never have imagined as no doubt he assumed that Socialism would have provided a more human alternative by now.
Here is a reminder of Engels’ impressions of London taken from his “Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844”:
“After roaming the streets of the Capital a day or two, making headway with difficulty through the human turmoil and the endless lines of vehicles, after visiting the slums of thenmetropolis, one realises for the first time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city ; that a hundred powers which slumbered within them have remained inactive, have been suppressed in order that a few might be developed more fully and multiply through union with those of others. The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and ranks crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together within a limited space. And however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.” (pp.17-18).
Labour Affairs 