HI-TECH; HOW ARE YOU?

Many achievements and processes change to an enormous degree in any normal length of human life.

If, while I was a child, you had told me that in 20 years’ time there would be the transplanting of hearts and kidneys, I would have asked you (politely of course) which mental institution you were residing at. In fact they were called ‘lunatic asylums’ in those days. We are at least more considerate and sensitive about human disability in this day and age, despite certain segments of the global population being happy to kill other human beings.

The universal implementation of synchromesh in the vehicle gearbox enabled changing gears without having to ‘double de-clutch’. Imagine how thoroughly inconvenient it would have been for the average driver on our streets today, talking or messaging on the cellphone while attempting a complicated gear/clutch synchronisation (lol)? I dare say that the appalling habit of ‘cellphone to ear’ while driving (someone talking on the phone nearly drove straight into me yesterday) may simply give rise to hi-tech development of a steering wheel that no longer requires any hands. Hang on, that’s the self-drive vehicle; and we have it already.

I also experienced the days of accountancy training in the period even before electric calculators. You had to add up a column of figures manually. And it was in pounds, shillings and pence. The same in Eswatini as in England in those days, where there was no straightforward decimal calculation either. One night I had to stay up for hours trying to balance the figures in the financial statement because of a client deadline. It was such a simple mistake I had made, and one that stared at me for hours before I spotted it; finally at 4am! Once I found my mistake I slept beautifully for the few remaining hours. Correction, I wasn’t beautiful. Let’s just say I slept soundly; but soundlessly one hopes! (lol). You will undoubtedly notice that I just committed one of the new mistakes in modern writing – using an exclamation mark at the same time as ‘lol’ to tell the reader you were joking. I trust I am forgiven.

Machines

Today? Well, to start with, today will be the golden olden days before you can blink an eye. Difficult to visualise? Perhaps very soon we will simply talk figures to a computer that will pick up the sounds and add them up. Someone is going to call me and say – but we can already do that. What is not disputed is that information technology is speeding along at an almost exponential rate. One of the inevitable questions that we have to consider is – will ‘machines’ replace ‘man’. Neither word in inverted commas is strictly accurate but you get what I mean.
Let’s turn the clock back to the Industrial Revolution. It hit different countries in different time zones but let’s just say it was the 1800s. People didn’t worry about the same things in those days and it would be quite a (pleasant) shock to be able to spend a day in the life of the average individual of those times. But it is likely that the more energetic thinkers of the day will have predicted that machines would replace human beings. And machines did so to a very large extent; but, until recent times, only in a physical sense. And no one, while caressing the steering wheel of that new car, expressed concern that the entire vehicle had been largely put together by a robot. And the reason for that acquiescence was that, as fast as machines replaced man, other work opportunities arose.

Mankind

In earlier days machines competed with, and ultimately beat human beings in the areas that demanded physical ability. Manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated but the physical functions lost by mankind allowed room for the cognitive – that is thinking – skills to apply themselves to the work. Whether it was in areas such as planning, research or human resources development, the cognitive functions filled the space; there was room for everyone and most, if not all, benefitted from it in terms of a higher standard of living. So unemployment remained an outcome of economic malady and misfortune, and not the effect of hi-tech.

Until recent times we thought that the cognitive demands – the thinking – would remain the impenetrable preserve of mankind; no entry for the machine. But could there possibly, in another 30 years’ time, be machines continuing to replace man but in a comprehensive, all-embracing manner? The answer must surely be – substantially yes, but exclusively no. The earlier argument, that there will still be cognitive functions that machines can’t perform, is no longer valid. They are increasingly able to ‘think’ in the way that a human being can. It’s called artificial intelligence or AI. And AI, equipped with the right sensors, is increasingly able to outperform humans, even in the analysis of human emotions; we’re looking at the breakthrough in life and social sciences. Next week we’ll look deeper.

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