Welcome to the Machine

I have always wondered why they have those alphabets/numbers written in that funny, wavy pattern whenever you have to register on a website. You know what I’m talking about, the one that looks something like this:

For a long time, I thought it was probably just to make sure that people were sober at the time of registration, although registration hardly requires the kind of complex hand-eye coordination and alertness that driving does. Or maybe it was just some sort of a test of eyesight, although why a website would decide registrations on the basis of eyesight was beyond me.

Then one day I spotted a link below this picture on one of the websites, which said something along the lines of “Wondering why we make you go through this ridiculous exercise?” It then turned out that this is done to make sure that it is a human who is registering and not a machine! I was absolutely astounded by this fact – now that’s the kind of machine I want! There are actually machines in this world that go about trying to register on different websites! Suddenly, it seemed that there was something to this whole artificial intelligence business. Think about it – why would someone actually create a machine whose task it is to simply register on various websites? No, this had to be a machine with a mind of its own – surely, this was a case of a machine developing artificial intelligence, although I must admit that wishing to register on websites hardly represents the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Ok, for a machine it might be impressive, but when you really think about it, “Mom, I registered on a website!” hardly holds a candle to “Mom, I scored the highest grade at Maths.” Yet, a machine trying to register on websites on its own does give me some cause for hope.

I say this because at a certain phase during my growing-up years, I used to read a lot of science fiction. These were books written by the likes of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, etc during the 50s, when space exploration fooled everyone into making frankly silly predictions about life in the future. So I would read about people having their personal jet-packs in the 21^st century and travelling to far off galaxies just to get a cup of coffee (well, they did show off even in the future!). There were all these pictures painted of a grand universe like the Star Wars but without the fighting, where everybody is rich and healthy and robots and machines would be doing everything for us. Yet, one decade into the 21^st century and all we have to show for is the internet and lifestyle-related diseases. Doesn’t really make for proud reading, does it, compared to all those predictions?

I have a machine which only seems to have a mind of its own when it decides to hang just when I’m approaching an important deadline. Or when it decides to be wonderfully whimsical about how much time it would take to copy some data from one location to another. Whenever it says “Copying Item 1 of 415, 13 hrs 45 mins remaining”, it actually completes the task in two minutes flat. But when it says “Copying Item 1 of 12, 2 minutes remaining”, it ends up taking a good 25 minutes! And in the middle of this process, a little dialog box would appear that says “This box has appeared purely for the purpose of annoying you. Do you need it?” And when you click No, another pointless little box appears that says “Are you ABSOLUTELY sure you do not want the box that came up purely for the purpose of annoying you?”

On other occasions, when I’m trying to insert a picture in the middle of a lot of text matter, the text is suddenly scattered across the page in an interesting but sadly unreadable pattern. And the one time I’ve been working feverishly on a presentation or document for an hour and have not saved it, the machine decides that the time is right for a random restart. And then there is this voracious appetite for updates. Every second day, a little icon dutifully appears in the taskbar proclaiming that new updates are available. You try hard to ignore it, until it solemnly reminds you that “It is strongly recommended that you install the new updates. Otherwise your machine might delete all data, do an upside-down flip and flirt with deadly viruses.”

That is why I’m so impressed to hear about a machine that tries to register on its own. After years of dealing with a machine that came across as only marginally smarter than a call-centre employee, it seems that there are finally signs of the unfulfilled sci-fi promises of the ‘50s coming to fruition.