Carry On... #Bow Down To Your Robot Overlords

Happy Holidays! Season's Greetings! 


Chestnuts are roasting, sleigh bells are ringing, yule logs are burning, and computers are trying to enslave the human race.

I am not currently in a position to do anything about the yule logs, but as a public service, I feel I should pass along this timely warning about the imminent destruction of humanity. 

So, Happy Chanukah! Merry Christmas! Blessed Kwanzaa! Happy New Year! The machines are coming for us and we're all going to die!

I'm being ridiculous, of course; after all what respectable liberal would ever say "Happy Chanukah" in public? But they are warning us of the coming robot uprising.

It's The End of the World!!!

In May, 2023, a short, headline-grabbing statement was published by a group calling itself the "Center for AI Safety" (CAIS):


Their statement was signed by thousands of scientists, politicians and other public figures. It was widely reported and discussed in the media. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak re-posted the statement and recently gave a speech in which he echoed these concerns and expanded upon them (the ones about extinction from AI; not the ones about pandemics or nuclear war).

Frankly, I think humanity should put one or two other "global priorities" slightly higher on the list before it starts to obsess too much about the coming robot uprising. In all likelihood we're going to extinguish ourselves long before any hypothetical AI system has a chance to take a crack at it, but the rapid rise of AI is most definitely a trending issue at the moment, and I am calling this film series Carry On #Trending, so let's devote this final night of the year to our robot overlords!

Killer Robots, Terminations and Exterminations

If anyone from the Center for AI Safety thought they were issuing a timely warning about the dangers of machine intelligence, they should be aware that they're just a little late for that particular bandwagon. British writer Samuel Butler got there first when he published the same warnings in an article entitled Darwin Among the Machines a few years ago.

Actually 160 years ago.

Published in The Press newspaper in 1863, his article warned that the Industrial Revolution was giving rise to a new taxonomy of "machine life" on Earth that could one day supplant humans as the dominant species.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

Samuel Butler may have been one of the first to perceive machines as a threat, but he was by no means the last, as a brief survey of popular culture will surely remind us. 


Machines enslaved the human race in The Matrix (1999) while other machines wiped out most of us in a nuclear apocalypse in The Terminator (1984). 


A psychotic computer program attempted world domination in Tron (1982) perhaps taking its cue from WOTAN, the homicidal computer that tried to rule the world from the top of the Post Office Tower in a Doctor Who episode from 1966.


The crew of the USS Enterprise encountered megalomaniacal computers on a regular basis in the original Star Trek, and who could forget HAL, the ship's onboard computer in 2001, who murdered the crew and then sang a song (badly)?


In the face of all this computerised violence, oppression and world domination, it's hardly surprising that so many people are convinced that Artificial Intelligence is evil, dangerous and a credible threat to the human race, right up there with nuclear war.


Perhaps this would be a good moment to point out that actual AI systems have done none of these things. I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but there is no secret globalist World Order of chatbots. And if extremist robots were truly running the human race from behind the scenes, you'd think they'd be better at it by now. 

But AI is currently considered an existential threat to human survival and now it has become fashionable to hate computers, or anything that looks like a computer.


So we seem to have arrived at a moment in history where everything bad about the modern world is being blamed on computing, and suddenly everyone wants to be a computer pogrommer. Again. 

How many times do we have to go through this?


But anyway, all of this preamble (and yes, that was the preamble) is to explain why our final film of the season is devoted to society's mindless and unreasoning fear of being replaced by computers.

So now let's talk about Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.


Hepburn and Tracy made nine films together between 1942 and 1967. Desk Set (1957) was the eighth of those, and the first one they made in colour. It was written by husband-and-wife team Henry and Phoebe Ephron (the parents of Nora; you've probably heard of her). It's a very sharp and thoroughly delightful comedy, and also a charming Christmas movie.



Desk Set is also one of the first films to deal with the onset of the computer age. 


Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, head of the research department of the (fictional) Federal Broadcasting Network. She and her colleagues are very troubled by the arrival of Richard Sumner (Tracy) a "Methods Engineer" who may or may not have been hired to replace their entire department with an "electronic brain" called EMERAC: The "Electromagnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator".


EMERAC (as portrayed in the film) is a large and noisy machine that reads punch cards and requires specialized operators (which is a fairly accurate representation of computer technology as it existed in 1957).


But it is also shown to have a vast repository of stored knowledge and the ability to respond to (written) enquiries in conversational English. If EMERAC resembles anything, it resembles a modern search engine.


Bunny and her colleagues are very concerned about this emerging technology that could render them obsolete and unemployed, and in some ways they have every reason to be concerned. The capabilities of EMERAC were rather fantastical by the standards of computers in 1957, but not by the standards of computers in 2023. Virtually everything depicted in the film has subsequently come to pass in recent years. The only difference now is that the computers are much smaller.

160 Years ago, Samuel Butler observed that machines were evolving. As he put it at the time, simple machines like the lever and the fulcrum were the single-celled organisms that had developed into the complex machines of his generation (the textile mills and steel plants of the Industrial Age). 



At this rate of development, he wondered, could machines one day replace humans as the dominant intelligent life on Earth?

His essay may have been a semi-serious thought experiment about the theory of evolution (another fairly modern idea in 1863) but 21st Century pundits are now using terms like "extinction" when discussing developing trends in Artificial Intelligence, and suddenly Butler's fears (and those expressed in films like Desk Set) are being taken surprisingly seriously.


If all of this sounds rather apocalyptic and paranoid, let me stress that Desk Set is a very funny romantic comedy, and a perfect vehicle for Hepburn and Tracy - who were devoted to each other onscreen and off.

A Very Special Guest Speaker

Desk Set will be our final film of 2023, and I am very pleased to announce that (for the first time at one of these evenings) we will be joined by a special guest speaker, who has graciously consented to talk with us about computing technology then and now, and about the legitimacy of the fears voiced in the film, as well as modern fears of rapidly developing AI.

Make sure you join us for what will hopefully be an informative and illuminating discussion!

We will (jointly) present Desk Set at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 14th of December at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

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