CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM

Let me introduce you to Allegro, a 12-year-old boy who grows up in a world where robots have found a way to reproduce with humans and have taken over the world. In response to this uprising, Allegro forms a resistance army to defend humans against robots and also to assassinate the scientists responsible for creating them. Son to a father who is no longer alive, Allegro discovers that he is adopted. So alongside his charge to preserve humanity, he pursues a concurrent mission to find his roots and he is reunited with his birth mother. Unfortunately, it turns out she had become a robot herself, forcing Allegro to kill her. It was the ultimate manifestation of his commitment to the mission, and his mother beams with pride over her own murder/destruction at the hands of her son. How could I possibly know this? It’s because I’m sharing a story that is told with her voice, almost as if she was issuing a warning from beyond the grave. This is the story of Empty Planet, a work of fiction nested within another that tells the story of Kenneth Roberts, and his own pursuit to find his birth mother, presumed to be Professor Ursula Kent, the author of Empty Planet. The same book that inspires Kenneth, to start a bombing campaign in pursuit of the destruction of all machines and artificial intelligence and the people who create or promote them. Believing the mission of Allegro, to be a charge from his author mother to him, Kenneth would make a final play to kill Professor Kent which is thankfully foiled by the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI, the stars of the hit TV series, Criminal Minds.

“This is all fiction,” you may say. “There’s no chance of it happening in real life.” “There will be no Kenneth Roberts and certainly no Allegros or robot uprisings.” I’m inclined to agree; however the pessimist in me will consider me remiss if I did not bring up the story of Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski a.k.a. “The Unabomber”, an American serial killer referenced in the Criminal Minds episode I mentioned earlier. Like Allegro and Kenneth, the Unabomber was an anti-technology activist, only this time, he is real, and so is the damage he caused. The Unabomber signifies an extreme representation of a fear that many holds; that tech is here to replace and take away from humanity. First our jobs, then who knows what else.

This is a fear rightly evoked by significantly popular rhetoric about technology and the post-digital era. A rhetoric that describes computing devices more as tools that do things on their own, ultimately against us, and less as entities with agency that work in conjunction with humans. This is not boomer rhetoric, neither is it blue-collar rhetoric, this is an ‘everybody fear’. Like Justin Hodgson mentions, the post-digital era represents the full immersion of the digital in our lives, and that is both a scary and exciting notion.

Maybe our fears evolve from our inclinations to master all tech like we do everything else. Maybe rather than mastery, we only need open ourselves up to discovery by playing and working with these tools, and seeing what good can come of it, seeing what improvements they can make to our lives. And should the tech we trust ever take a turn for evil like all human creations have the tendency to, maybe we have to make sure to have a switch within reach that can do this.