I've been a bit spaced-out since yesterday's Blog! It seems everything I've seen since has had something to do with space travel or 'the future', owing to a combination of an ISS Spacewalk yesterday and all these announcements about AI - Artificial Intelligence - in robots! I spent yesterday editing Wedding photographs on the Mac with a live-stream from NASA flickering away in the corner of the screen. I'd suddenly become absolutely fascinated with a space-walk taking place outside the International Space Station. It went on for hours! One minute the two astronauts were working away in blazing sunlight and the next - well, after 90 minutes - they were plunged into darkness as they flew behind the earth. But rattling around in my head as I watched it were the words of Stephen Hawking, who is starting to panic about both the growth of intelligence in robots and the desperate damage we're causing to the planet. He reckons humans' only chance of survival will be to fly the nest - buzz off - leave the Earth and set up shop somewhere else...
Well, I agree with old Steve about the state of the planet but, thing is, one of the tasks - on which an astronaut worked for almost 3 hours yesterday - was plain old lubrication of some space hardware. Oiling a crane, basically! So I reckon that we'll be safe from the takeover of the robots as long as they don't work out how to oil their own joints! Mind you, they might look after the planet a little better than we have ..
©Martin O'Neill
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