HYDERABAD: JK Rowling, in the guise of Ollivander, once said “After all, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things — terrible, yes, but great”. The unmentionable of the muggle universe is now — Artificial Intelligence. With Google Allo’s release a few weeks back, free AI is finally going mainstream. The only thing that’s stopping the intelligent Assistant from taking over the world, is that it cannot make connections based on previous conversations or messages. Although, you can sustain interesting dialogue with it for 15-20 minutes (includes playing games like tic-tac-toe, emoji guessing games, quizzes).
Videogames have been very forthcoming in making clever, albeit dreary plots on the future of technology (and the subsequent apocalypse). In the post-apocalyptic situation, there are some robots that supplement comic relief — like the spidery ‘Codsworth’ in Fallout 4, and the Stephen Merchant-voiced Robot ‘Wheatley’ in Portal 2. Codsworth and Wheatley are quite harmless, follow you around and offer to help you out in times of trouble, much like what Google Assistant looks like right now. It’s fine to share your most private details with them — what’s the harm, right?
But then there are the terrifying AI monsters — it incites fear because it has no tangible body, it is almost omniscient — a man-made god. It has (is AI singular) the power to take over every surveillance camera and computer in the world: no information is sacred. Like Portal 2’s GLaDOS that has its own personality, it can similarly make its own decisions – it answers to no one. And how does Portal 2 start? With GLaDOS destroying the world, of course. The protagonist is all alone in the universe, assisted by Wheatley which just hovers around like a fly, telling us jokes so we don’t feel so alone (but you are still talking to a robot).
So now, there’s a slow shift of what I call ‘apocalyptic thought’ — from biological (zombie) to technological (AI takeover). And this week, the speculations on JJ Abrams making a movie on Half-Life and Portal intensified — and when JJ Abrams discusses a potential movie on a technological apocalypse plot, the conspiracy is legitimised.
(This economics graduate spends her leisure time preparing for the zombie apocalypse)