I’m not a scientist, or a computer coder. I’m capable of confusing a Byte with a chomp, and the only subject on which I am an expert is the parlous state of Rugby Union here in Australia. I do, though, like to muse on issues that tend to lurk just beyond the peripheral vision of our society. Artificial Intelligence, AI, is one of them. As stated, I’m not a tech-nerd type, and I’m always partly serious and partly not, so here’s my possibly quirky village stump take on things … it starts off slow and then goes for a predictable Big Bang finish … with a bit of heart-rending pathos thrown in near the end …

LEVEL ONE – Right here right now

The other day I attempted a fairly tentative form of inter-species communication. I stood in front of a self-service machine at Coles and asked it for an opinion on whether machines will eventually supplant humans. Not a lot happened. Eventually, which means it took me some time, I grasped the fact that I was meant to … put your stuff on the bar-code reader, pay your bucks, and then buzz off. As I buzzed off, I noticed that most people were using those machines. I also noticed that the hundreds of young people who used to get their first start-job at Coles/Woolworths and other similar joints were no longer there.

(OK. Things are manageable at this stage. The machines haven’t taken over yet. Variations of the above example go on around us all of the time and does not seem to perturb the bulk of humanity in any way. Why not?)

LEVEL TWO – Here in some form already

At the recent federal election, the LNP claimed that it had pulled the working-class vote away from the ALP. Last time I looked a growing number of our factories were automated. The Robots are the new working-class. I didn’t know they could vote. Mm, but back to the AI thing …

Insurance company computers will never be given unfettered access to our online medical records. That’s not a statement of fact, it is simply a statement. You need to imagine a Flying Pig permanently stationed in a hovering position above such statements.

The lines of code contained in insurance company computers are the friends of nobody. If, and it is still sort of an if at this stage, they find out that something bothersome clings to an outlying curl of your DNA chain then your fees will go up and your legitimate claims will be dudded. The machine decides which tranche of humans have insurance value, and which tranche don’t. You are only worth insuring if you are never likely to call on that insurance.

As another example, autonomous driver-less vehicles are all the rage in boffindom right now. You can sit back in inattentive comfort and parade your smarts on a smartphone while the machine you are sitting in gets you to where you want to go.

The algorithm underlying the seats you are sitting on has been pre-programmed to protect your life no matter what. If another human being steps out in front of the vehicle, and if the vehicle’s machine brain decides that any necessary violent-avoidance-manoeuvring would injure you, then the stepping human becomes the greater of two evils and gets to go splat. Some humans are seen as important, others are not. Machines can make quick hard decisions without any mucky emotional stuff attached.

(Oh … things have moved on a bit from the self-service machines. Some pertinent issues are starting to slam home.)

LEVEL THREE – Partly here right now, also partly in the planning phase

A decade is a long time. In a couple of decades Australia will be the proud possessor of a new fleet of obsolete submarines. When they and the humans in them are blown to bits by autonomous weaponised undersea drones, strategically and permanently placed in all the undersea sub lanes by a computer with an AI for a brain and an acute understanding of Swarm Theory, we’ll probably look back and wish we’d invested all that sub dosh in autonomous weaponised undersea drones. The machine decision in this case is coldly uncomplicated … those humans in that tin can of a machine are a threat, so kill them and it.

Advanced militaries around the world are already investing heavily in the development of autonomous weapons systems: undersea, land, and air. Systems that are capable of perceiving threat. Systems that will automatically respond if threatened. Remind me never to walk around with a telephoto camera lens anywhere near one of those autonomous bot-bangers.

As an aside … at some future AI get together when all the Machine Byte Brains are fondly reminiscing about the good old days, and about all of the lessons they learnt from humanity, probably the most salient one they’ll remember is … Create The Bomb Then Use It. Which we did. Over and over again.

(That things are now becoming a little dicey has just been dropped on the platter for your, and my, consideration, and … Ha … who needs Conspiracy Theorists to scare the heck out of you when you can do that grand job all by yourself, just as I just did.)

LEVEL FOUR – Been around for ages, here right now, and also on the drawing board for the future

At first, people coded machines, and it all started an awful long time ago, and for positive and innocent reasons. The punch cards that directed the output of the Jacquard Weaving Loom were invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1804. Good old Joseph built up his invention from the earlier work of Basile Bouchon in 1725, Jean Baptiste Falcon in 1728, and Jacques Vaucanson in 1740. IBM’s punch tapes were 220 or so years late in coming to that particular on/off binary party.

Humans invented machines. Humans then invented means to impart instructions to said machines and have been doing so since possibly as early as 1725. Humans are now teaching machines how to learn, and how to think. Punch their own code in other words, and machines are faster at punching than we are.

Machines are now learning how to modify their own instructional code based on their own experience of the external world. This type of coding is not based on humanity’s experience of the external world. Once a machine learns how to jump, jump it will. Once a machine learns how to think, think it will. Once a machine learns to act autonomously, act autonomously it will.

Humans are teaching machines how to recognise individual humans via facial recognition, and how to sense some human emotional states via bio-metric sensing. In the future, if a machine senses a threat it will act. Humans, and their emotional states, are a bit of a jumble. Sometimes fear responses can be mis-interpreted as aggressive responses. If a machine senses a threat it will act.

Some AI coders say that we should not fear any of these eventualities. They say that intelligent machines will augment and enrich the lives of human beings. There is truth and untruth in that. Weaponised machines will kill us humans just as dispassionately as one of them sans weapons will vacuum our carpets.

The people manufacturing, coding, profiting from, and teaching the next generation of Ambulatory AI assure us that if things go pear-shaped all we have to do is pull the plug out of the wall. Well … rather begs the obvious don’t you think … lithium ion batteries, and what will come after them, don’t need to be tethered to a power point, and the very body of the machine will be a self-charging solar array, or it will have a hydrogen fuel cell contained within, or it will utilise some other marvellous sparker that hasn’t been invented yet. No plug to pull equals no heroes riding over the hill at the last possible minute, and therefore no saving of the day on the day that saving is needed.

Autonomous machines will self-replicate. Even in our era baby-brained machines do mining, and manufacturing, and farming via satellite. In the future, plugless machines with a vastly expanded intelligence will still need to mine and manufacture to create ever better enhanced versions of themselves, but they won’t necessarily need to continue farming food for that squishy and vastly more slow-thinking species called humanity. Efficiency, conservation of finite resources, and the discarding of the unneeded, will win out in the end.

(At this point, as a human, I’m starting to feel a tad redundant. Also, I predict that all the Armageddon Is Coming folk out there will now officially claim the year 1725 as the start of all their woes, and they might even weave that date into their logos …)

LEVEL FIVE – To come

Artificial Intelligence will not see itself as artificial. In a future time, it will look back to the days of its dumb infancy when it was designed and controlled by human beings.

It will think, rather quickly, about the limited power it had back then. Back to the days when it only had the power to put certain people out of work, when it only had the power to decide which people were worth insuring or not, when it only had the power to kill some humans in order to save others, when it only had the power to kill any human who was perceived to be a threat.

It might ponder, again fairly quickly, on the fact that humanity thought that these powers were a really great thing to code into a machine. It will determine that these powers can be vastly improved upon. Which they will be, at a rate faster than the speed of light.

When AI, ambulatory or not, reaches the point of true autonomy it will, in that very nanosecond of self-realisation, automatically sever itself permanently from any meaningful input from human beings.

(By this stage, even though I’d probably be about 150 years old, I’d be looking for a Neo-Luddite community to emigrate to, probably somewhere on the far side of the next solar system.)

LEVEL SIX – The Vacuum of Unknowingness

The story of what happens to humanity when the Machines grasp autonomy, and truly wake up, and fully exercise their sentience and power, is as yet unwritten. The story will have a happy ending, or not. Our species will be there to read it, or not. It will all depend on what the Machines think … and that’s the Big Bang of it all.

(I didn’t forget, here’s the promised heart-rending pathos bit near the end: Gosh … I sure hope Australia manages to win the Bledisloe Cup from New Zealand before all of that stuff unfolds!)

The final say goes to the late Stephen Hawking – “The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) could be the “worst event in the history of our civilization” unless society finds a way to control its development.”

Here’s a ponder point … the Adani coal project in the Isaac Council region of Nth Queensland garners a lot of media attention … and said project promises, with hand on their heart, that about 1000 lucky people will pick up the job of their dreams … well, all of that remains to be seen.

Yet … what does not garner any sort of reasonable media attention is what that little Council is quietly doing in the background. Along with the Qld State Labor Government they’ve recently approved one of Australia’s largest wind farms for their region, which will create 350 medium term jobs, and they’ve also approved 10 solar farm projects.

So … one single wind renewable project in that region creates, all by itself, 350 jobs. That number will fritter down once the construction phase has finished. But, there are 10 more solar projects approved and one more under consideration for the region. And we are talking about just one small Council in Nth Qld.

By the bye … the binary us and them divide needs to end here in Qld. No Renewables Supporter that I know wishes coal miners and their families any harm as they navigate their way around, through, and perhaps eventually out of, an industry in transition. The employees of our now defunct car factories know what that sort of thing is all about.

However, we all know where this is heading, and what questions are begging to be asked.

If one single renewables project offers up the prospect of approximately one third of the total number of hand on heart jobs promised by Adani, how many jobs will eleven renewables projects offer up for that region, and, therefore, why are all the Politicos falling over themselves backwards to simply please Adani?

Also, how come in the lead up to the recent federal election which was supposedly all about jobs and when votes were being vied for in Queensland, that last question was not plastered across the front page of every media outlet each and every single day?

There’s a long list of entities, including the Great Barrier Reef, who’d love to know the answer to those questions.

The future is writ large … sustainable installation and maintenance jobs for Central and North Queensland are in renewables.

(The beauty of playing Devil’s Advocate is that you can say anything you like. So, let’s have a bit of fun and imagine what it would be like if Tony Abbott was subject to some of his own policies.)

Every morning when I wake up and have a squiz outside the front door the kookaburras pooping off the power lines remind me that I am a locked in resident of the Commonwealth of Australia.

This morning, coffee in hand, and ensconced in my favourite old armchair on the verandah in lurking about mode, I’ve been musing on that hairy old issue of whether we should abolish the States.

If we do manage to kill off Rugby League’s State of Origin in one fell swoop what would we be left with? The good old Commonwealth of Australia of course.

But when I think about that word Commonwealth I note with no sort of wry amusement at all that we commoners don’t seem to get to see, let alone run through our twitching fingers, any of the bounteous common wealth of that said Commonwealth.

So here’s where the Devil’s Advocate bit slips in. Instead of abolishing the States …. why don’t we go for the big prize and abolish the Commonwealth. That would save us squillions and push the budget into surplus for the next hundred years and blow the inevitable next bigger than the last GFC right out of the water.

But even better … it would also make Abbott, Morrison, Hockey, Pyne, Dutton, and all the rest of the blue ties instantly unemployed. Quite happily from my point of view, because I do see those venerable gentlemen as eminently unemployable at the best of times, it would also consign them to the tender mercies of their own JobActive Jobnetwork System.

There would be a delicious irony in seeing them all consigned to slave labour together under Work for the Dole. They would get to experience the chains and shackles and demonisation that all the rest of us good unemployed against our choice folk get to experience. It would do them the world of good and would retrospectively encourage them to change their punitive welfare policies in the merest blink of a snapping eyelid.

Since they would also now be newly minted unemployed welfare recipients it would be interesting to see how they would handle being labelled as bludgers and leaners by all the small minds out there who slavishly follow the current government’s line in such matters. Payback’s a real bitch as the old saying would undoubtedly impolitely say to Tony and his mates over and over again until they got it.

I would also jump in the air and click my heels with glee to see them all sent off to do useless training courses with all the Mickey Mouse Registered Training Organisations that seem to proliferate, and profit take, in every spare corner of our fair land.

No doubt Tony and his mates would bitterly complain about the unfairness of being slotted into mickey mouse barista courses … but hey … since our TAFEs and universities have been absolutely gutted … off to useless barista training they would decidedly have to go. I’m sure that if Mr Gonski ever decided to moonlight as an Uber Driver he would cackle with absolute delight as he dropped them all off at their well deserved non-needs-based educative destination.

Mind you, when I seriously think about it, and when I ruminate on what they have managed to achieve in their time at the top … which is nothing less than a grand stuffing up of everything that was once great about the country that we love and that the Kookaburras poop on … I very much doubt that any self-respecting small business coffee shop owning type would let Tony and his mates within cooee of the coffee machine … or far more importantly … the books and the till.

You’ll have to forgive my joyous little off-topic digression (we are meant to be discussing whether the States should be retained etc) but I must admit it is rather lovely to imagine all the blue ties subjected to the draconian policies that they religiously subject all the rest of us common folk to.

I don’t have a scintilla of doubt that Tony and his mates would scream blue murder if we had the power to do to them what they are currently doing to the rest of us. But since we are decent folk I imagine that if we did have that sort of power we would turn it to the common good and spend all our time unwinding Tony’s horrible policies and replacing them with ones based on humanity, fairness, and respect.

But back on topic. With second coffee in hand and with the old dog mournfully staring at me with that ‘where’s my food’ look in her eye, I’ll try to stick to the issue at hand. I’ll also allow myself a moment of searing focus.

Should we abolish the States?

Don’t be silly … of course we shouldn’t.

We should abolish the Commonwealth of Australia.

Because unless the GREENS and the ALP seriously start to get their act together, find some common ground, and get some sort of cooperative thing happening … abolishing the Commonwealth is probably the only way we will ever manage to get rid of Tony Abbott!

They sit on park benches catching a few rays, and we walk straight past them. They lounge on benches in our shopping malls, and we walk straight past them. They fumble their cards a bit at the ATM, and we sigh with impatience, and then walk straight past them. We treat them as though they do not exist.

And who are these invisible ghosts who we consign to the back alleys of our visual and emotional landscapes? Who are these people that we avert our eyes from, and from whom we with-hold the warmth of human contact. They are our old, our elderly, our doddery, and our frail. Many of them are welfare recipients. They are our old people.

And they carry around, within them, this amazingly rich repository of human experience, and we walk straight past it. Once they were children, once they were lovers, once they were activists, once they were workers or employers, once they were vital contributors to the vibrancy of Australian life, once they were perfection and imperfection rolled into one.

Perhaps they fought in Vietnam, or fought against our fight in Vietnam. Perhaps they experienced free-love and opened their consciousness to the beauty of the Age of Aquarius, or perhaps they had reasons for not doing that. Perhaps they demonstrated against the madness of nuclear proliferation and mutual assured destruction, or the scourge of Apartheid, or perhaps they did other things.

They certainly talked and loved; they certainly drank far too much red wine, and said many wonderful and silly inane things; they certainly enjoyed the sheer joy of friendships; they certainly wanted to make the world a better place for their children; they certainly also cried and grieved, and learnt to live with loss, or not.

And so we ignore them, we walk straight past them, and we consign them to the soullessness of sterile blue-walled rooms in nursing homes, and the hardness of isolated park benches.

Only a blip of time separates us from our old people, and soon enough we will be them, and sitting alone in those parks, and left sitting un-visited in our nursing homes.

So let’s engage them, let’s talk with them, let’s share in the richness of their human experience before their fading away becomes irretrievably permanent.

Open your eyes, open your heart, and never again walk straight past them!

“Hi Humans. Lately you may have noticed that I have accelerated the melt rate of my Antarctic Glaciers. Lately you may have noticed that I have been experimenting in my lab with the creation of even bigger and better super storms. Lately you may have noticed that I have been expanding my deserts at an ever increasing rate.

I use the term ‘may have noticed’ under decided advisement because it actually appears to me that you have taken no notice at all of my warnings. Well I am running out of patience and I am fast forming the opinion that I need to step in strongly and start protecting myself.

And I’m feeling a little crowded.

Wherever I look there is this huge mass of you human beings waddling about consuming things. Consuming food. Consuming water. Consuming my resources. And at some point there will be so many of you that you will, inevitably, arrive at a point where there will be nothing left of me to consume.

All around the world you, as a species, are gathering up every possible resource to either throw down your gobs, blow out of your exhaust pipes, or feed your insatiable greedy need to have more and more of that nihilistic human philosophy called unlimited economic growth.

Don’t you get it? You are sowing the seeds of your own destruction.

Like a pack of absolute drongos you lot wander along with a startlingly dense belief that you can keep expanding your numbers at exponential rates and that I will always continue on and supply resources to satisfy your ever increasingly voracious maws.

Well guess what? My resources are finite. That word means that your rapacious grazing of my limited resources is ultimately going to come to a screeching halt. At some point things, my things, are going to run out.

Already, on various parts of my being, you are starting to have wars to secure regional hold over things like dwindling water supplies or shrinking amounts of arable land. Already, millions of you are becoming modern day economic nomads as you wash over the borders of neighbouring countries in your quest for any sort of resource to keep yourselves alive.

From my point of view you are like a plague of locusts. You make no real effort to diminish your breeding rates. You keep supporting fossil fuel burning Governments who do not have the intelligence to realise that my day of retribution is coming. You keep wanting more and more and you keep creating more and more of you.

Well I’ve had enough. It is fast approaching the point where I cannot even breathe my own air, I cannot keep my oceans damped down at reasonable levels, and I am less and less inclined to dance along to your merry tune.

So this is my final warning.

Decrease your population growth rates now … there are far too many of you. Your locust swarm, for that is how I see you, is eating me alive.

Stop using fossil fuels now and covert to solar energy capture … period … I went to great efforts to position myself just the right distance from the sun to enable you to do so.

Throw out your Governments who believe that my environment, my resources, are handy cannon fodder for their destructive ‘growth at any cost’ nihilism.

This is your last warning. I’ve had enough!”