Despite concerns, there is hope for our relationship with technology – The Daily Gazette
By Leo Rodriguez
For The Daily Gazette
The idea that our electronic pride will be our eventual downfall is a fear that has obviously been around for a long time.
From older short stories from 60s sci-fi magazines like Harlan Ellison, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” to more recent stories made at the dawn of the internet age like The Matrix have illustrated fear.
In “Scream”, the AI is designed to wage wars and ends up destroying humanity out of pure hatred, while in “Matrix”, the AI machines take over the world and use humans as batteries.
Since technology has the greatest influence on our daily lives more than ever, we believe that we are closer than ever to this cyber-apocalypse.
I tend to agree.
However, I don’t believe it will be an army of rogue AI exoskeletons that will rule us in the end.
In fact, I believe quite the opposite.
At worst, the “terminators” will likely only serve as enforcers of a hand that weaves the web that connects us all.
The tech world is increasingly looking to connect us all online, especially since the pandemic, where everyone was still doing almost everything online.
It’s not robots or AI that we should be worried about, but rather the fact that we have the whole world connected by a web that can be changed to benefit whoever runs it.
And what happens when this system they built suddenly doesn’t work?
Can we function without it, can we function without it?
We’ve built ourselves into a tech prison and I don’t know if we can trust the guys who hold the keys.
Despite all of this, I’d like to end this thought with hope rather than some sort of lingering dread.
Ultimately, I believe there is still a spark of good in humanity, and those dark, futuristic tales I mentioned earlier do not exist as prophecies but only as warnings.
The backbone of these stories was a theme of hope that rose despite the darkness of the worlds they were set in, and I believe that no matter how scary it gets, we’ll be fine by the end of it. one way or another.
Leo Rodriguez is a senior at Schenectady High School who also works at the Ambition cafe and bistro. His favorite things are video games, cinema and art. Leo plans to attend SUNY New Paltz in the fall to earn a degree in visual arts. He hopes to become a tattoo artist.
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Categories: Guest column, Opinion