1999

As I was reading Kurzweil's "1999," I thought about all of the scare over Y2K and how it dominated the news in the countdown to the new millennium, and how seemingly everyone thought it was possible that once the clock struck midnight we were going to be completely in the dark. People were buying in bulk everything from the grocery store in anticipation of the end of the world. I'm not sure what the national percentage was of people that were in full on panic mode, but I recall not thinking much of it, and figured things would be sorted out before anything potentially disastrous would happen. The 1999 film, Office Space, dealt with this as a minor subplot with the main protagonist of the film working at a software company that was working changing the code from the two digit to the four digit to accommodate the impending year 2000. The show I Love the 90's also tackled the subject. People were panicked and were prepared for the worst, but everything worked out in the end and life went on as nothing had ever happened.

But getting back to the article, Kurzweil lays out for us all of the different ways that artificial intelligence is evolving and all of the potential of a world where humans and machines move together, but with computers having the upper hand as we have taught them to behave in a hyper intelligent manner. Programmers have been working on software that can produce original poetry, art work, songs, and even dissertations once again proving that we have the technology and it is advancing at a rapid rate every day it is just a matter of time before we look back and wonder why we did all of this. I do not think that their fears are unfounded. The mere fact that we could one day be completely at the mercy of machines is a future that is not only scary but entirely possible I believe. I think for the most part, people are fearful of this fact, but by the time its happening, will we even care? It may be that we are so dependent on A.I. that we would not have it any other way, and we will be just machines ourselves droning on without no thoughts of our own. I hope this will not be the case but I can already see how technology dependent I am in my own life, and it upsets me, but I quickly forget and pick up my iPhone and check my Facebook and Twitter updates and I am fine again.