“We are doomed. Captcha was our last line of defense.”
I have this thing about RoboCop. The older I get, the more I feel that the 1987 classic was the most accurate dystopian future in all of science fiction. I mean, here you have a run-down and bankrupt Detroit, where the division between the rich and the poor is so wide that the upper crust are living the high life, and everyone else is nearly a street rat living in a corporate designed war zone. Every basic service of a functioning society has been privatized to the point that even the police no longer serve the average person who can’t afford to pay them. RoboCop was an experiment to make the police force obsolete, with technology taking yet more human jobs away. Capitalism run amok in austerity heaven, right? Technology scares me because in all of our best futuristic stories it is scientific advancement taken to it’s logical conclusion that destroys mankind in the end.
…and don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence. Has there ever been a movie where that turned out to be a good idea? HAL, Ultron, Skynet…. but AI will only serve to make our lives better, right? Sorry folks– our first real world explorations of AI have turned out a lot closer to Aileen Wuornos than to a Fembot.
“Pretty sure the Japanese robot dating thing isn’t going to take off until they work this glitch out.”
And check out what this robot who looks kind of like your nice normal uncle Phil has to say:
But Viking, what’s the harm in creating technology to perform simple tasks that make our lives easier?! Well, when you consider the first Christmas carol written by an artificial intelligence doesn’t sound even remotely friendly to mankind, do you really want robots serving you food at the drive-thru?
What does this have to do with swimmers and swammers? Well, I never thought that us swim folk would have to worry so quickly though about our jobs being taken away by technology… until now. Apparently, a rescue tube has been developed that makes lifeguards with swimming ability pretty much unnecessary. Check this out. Our summer jobs have been automated.
Sure kids, it looks like a fun remote control toy, but think of what it means for us…
Where are all my college swimmers going to work when they come back in the summer to train with my club now that rescue tubes have evolved to do the rescuing themselves? And how long before one of these things becomes sentient and starts deciding which of us aren’t worth the effort to save?
Hey, call me a luddite if you wish, but you know I’m not wrong. With this thing out there, are lifeguard candidates even going to have to pass a swim test? Soon we will be coached by robots, then we’ll be forced to race against robots, and then eventually, we might end up having real swim races again when the machines are making us race to the death for food as their entertainment in their human zoo.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Can the rescue tube perform in water rescue breaths? Or hold someone whose having a seizure above the water
Yes. Also has a built in AED that doubles as a taser in case it gets attacked while performing CPR.
Don’t forget Ash or Bishop from the Alien franchise.
We are artificial intelligence, we just don’t realize it.