Just yesterday, the author of this column suffered a shock, maybe even a culture shock. Late in the evening I sat at home, drank tea and corresponded on Telegram. This is probably how many people spend their evenings. And at one point poked the “People are nearby” text, it was no harbinger of trouble.
And right there, on the screen, a smiling photo of a neighbor we had been walking the dog with just an hour ago appeared. And a dozen more half-familiar and familiar faces. Someone even managed to happily throw a smiley face and write “Hello” in messages. With difficulty coming to my mind, of course I blocked everyone’s all access, I also thought of deleting the messenger and cutting the cable from the internet. Users had an absolute feeling that they were now out of the closet.
I thought and got scared. I still remember the time when you had to go to a computer club to meet someone on the Internet (not just smartphones, almost no one had a computer, dear young people, if you suddenly read me). There, it was necessary to log in to the club, for example, ICQ (youth, do not ask, the description is too long!). Overall, progress has been made since then.
By the way, nervously biting the bed, I was thinking about everything – I saw a friend’s post on the social network. A friend is a well-known, talented director and not paranoid at all. The text was:
“We are not just resting, our movements are being watched.
Yesterday I went to slot machines for the first time (in Minsk) in many years. Only. He passed out for a few hours (in a good way), stayed black, returned home. He only told his wife where he was. He gave to her what he had earned.
And literally immediately, Facebook (the owner of the Meta company was considered extremist and banned in Russia) began to advertise to me Minsk casinos in large doses. Or did he listen to me talk to his wife? Then stitches.
The author of this column has worked in the IT field for many years and has a good understanding of how such technologies are applied. And it can say a lot about Big Data and artificial intelligence. I remember a year later, probably in 2013, at a closed presentation from Microsoft that we fainted from a technology that allowed us to track the trajectory of the user’s gaze on the screen.
But still, such decisions somehow fell outside the realm of reality, in the minds of the laity they were semi-scientific myths, excerpts from science fiction books or, at best, prototypes on exhibitions. Now look out the window!
Neural networks paint portraits and write texts at such a level that it is far from always possible to distinguish artificial intelligence from natural. Self-driving cars are starting to circulate in cities. The telephone has learned to listen, spy, record and transmit vast amounts of information, no matter who needs it.
For me, who grew up in an environment where the eight-bit Dandy game console was a revelation, what happened is shocking if you stop and think about it. And what do people think (and such people are still alive, believe me, young friend) who have used wooden abacuses in the ministry all their lives – often it’s scary to think about!
And with all this, what is the absolute majority and this columnist doing with the endless number of opportunities we actually have? Something like “what order does the spider move its claws in” or “what is the sound of the whale” on Google at night.
Throughout the 20th century, science fiction writers, in general, fantasized and fantasized about what’s going on right now. Some were openly afraid that those who wished might reread Strugatsky’s Predatory Thing of the Century and marvel at the accuracy of the predictions.
But did it work for us – I think that’s it. And it often seems to me that if some kind of AI eventually wins us over, we’re all going to get there. It will be a kind of messenger for the exchange of ideas between artificial intelligences, the option “Near networks” will appear there, and in the evening a lazy and inept person will look there. I hope at least he was scared too.
The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.