A HAL moment for earthlings. – By Aubrey Joachim
Most baby boomers would remember watching the then futuristic sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”. One of the scenes towards the end of the movie show one of the astronauts who ventures outside the spacecraft to repair a communications antenna being locked out of the craft by the ‘intelligent’ computer HAL. The astronaut slowly drifts off into the black openness of space. Most of the other crew are also killed inside the craft. Basically HAL’s programmed instructions to protect certain mission secrets from the crew conflicts with its loyalty to the crew. Sounds familiar?
2.39 p.m. AEST July 19th, 2024: Computer systems across various establishments started failing. The blue ‘screen of death’ brought shivers down people’s spines. Within hours, word was filtering from across the globe – Planet Earth was literally shutting down! Persons could not transact at various service centres, supermarket systems failures forced them to shut down leaving shoppers empty handed. Taxi apps crashed and traffic light s played up. Health systems crashed – the NHS in the UK had to resort to pen and paper. People could not access their own funds as banking systems collapsed. Airlines cancelled flights as passengers were ‘locked’ out of their flights. Passengers who had landed could not access their baggage. TV stations could not broadcast and radio stations could not be contacted. Humanity was being isolated!
Ironically the failure was triggered by similar circumstances to HAL in the movie. Crowdstrike’s software that is charged with protecting computer systems and humans from keyboard villains via cybersecurity turned against its masters and left them in the lurch. Did Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick – the author and filmmaker respectively foresee such a situation 56 years ahead of their time?
Humanity is increasingly free-falling into the world of AI – artificial intelligence and automation. We live in a world that is increasingly out of our control. Most aspects of business and human activity are being handed over to the digital beings – Alexa and Google – who switch on our lights, turn on our air-conditioners, and sense what music to play for us. Technology drives and flies us to our destinations and even monitor and manage various origans in our bodies. Not all the failures of the event two days ago have yet been reported, but people could have been locked in their cars, stuck in lifts, out of water and power and even stuck in a Japanese toilet unable to complete their tasks as not even toilet paper would have been available!
If Clarke and Kubrick could have seen 50 years into the future from their point, what should we be seeing 50 years from now? Will we be holidaying on Mars? Will human life spans be determined by a robot or automated timeline switch? Certainly the Democrats in the US would welcome that even today! The ultimate paradigm shift would be us humans being ruled by machines. Perhaps this would be the desired ‘system change’ wished for by the citizens of Sri Lanka – 225 empty vessels being replaced by robots? Wishful thinking or desired reality? Only time will tell.
