Science Friction

One of the tricks to not being disappointed at the way your life has turned out is to not take romantic comedies too seriously. I’ve seen enough people who feel that their life is packed with bitter disappointment and humdrum banality simply because they haven’t had that wondrous love story, haven’t met ‘the one’ or do not have the sort of movie lifestyle where no one ever seems to be working but everyone is still rich enough to go on exciting and exotic trips where they follow their hearts to find themselves and have a perfect ending of life lessons learnt and redemption earned.

While the same could be said about other movie/book genres, I’ve never gotten terribly carried away by any of them, so life has been quite all right. However, if there is one genre that has left me disappointed, it is sci-fi. And it’s not because I was a sci-fi geek who’d read every book in the genre and watched all the Star Trek episodes and was therefore trapped in my own little world completely disconnected from what was going on around me. Nonetheless, there was a stage in life when I was reasonably into the genre – I’d read a few books of Isaac Asimov (how did that man write so many books?), Arthur C Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut and the like, as well as enjoyed many an episode of The Jetsons. Sure, calling yourself a fan of sci-fi because you watched the Jetsons is a bit like saying you’re interested in history because you watched the Flintstones, but still. All that space travel and time travel, new planets and strange new planes of existence, personal jet packs and robots that did everything for you – it was very exciting to my childlike imagination. Now, I wasn’t naive enough to expect all of that to have transpired by the time I was an adult, but am I the only one disappointed that it all seems as distant now as it did when I was 14? I mean, come on – I’m ok forgoing the robots and the new planets, but at least a personal jet pack that lets me fly around as I wish?

Not that I was alive then, but as early as the 1960s everyone thought that the space age was upon us. The Russians and the Americans were busy competing with each other by sending all sorts of animals to space, Neil Armstrong landed on the moon and David Bowie devoted half his discography to songs about space travel. Sci-fi movies and books did the rest, making it look like it was all a matter of time – that even if it wasn’t by the 1980s or 1990s, at least by the 21^st century a combination of advanced technology and terrible fashion sense would see us zipping around planets in our personal space crafts while wearing silver jumpsuits and sporting bad haircuts.

Yet, all we’ve got today is social networking and junk mail from African royalty of dubious antecedents. Now, a lot of you might think that this isn’t true – that artificial intelligence and virtual reality are the next big things that will alter the face of technology. All I can say is that for the last two decades, artificial intelligence and virtual reality have been the next big things, without ever really looking like becoming the current big thing. Again, a lot of you might say that companies like Google are at the cutting edge of innovation with drones that deliver pizzas and cars that drive themselves around – but these are the sort of things that kids today will be disappointed about 20 years from now when they see that they still haven’t transpired. Of course, if technology had actually done something truly remarkable like discover a cure to all of life’s diseases, I would have overlooked the lack of a personal jet pack – but the diseases have only gotten worse, haven’t they?

All this made me wonder – what has science been doing all these years? The answer suddenly dawned on me a few weeks back, when I was shopping for shoes. Shoes! That’s where all the scientific effort has been diverted to all these years. The best and brightest of scientific minds have been hired by the likes of Nike, Adidas and Puma, ferreted away into a remote and secret facility and been ordered to come up with the most advanced footwear that mankind has ever seen, never mind whether mankind really needed it. Shoes with technology so advanced, a gullible enough soul would be willing to part up to a month’s salary in exchange for a pair of them.

All I wanted was a pair of sneakers for the occasional bit of walking/exercising that, in all likelihood, I would not get around to doing, so I was hoping for a purchase that was quick and inexpensive.  Yet, I was interrogated thoroughly as to whether my intentions with the shoes were in any way honorable, what kind of activities would I subject them to, how long might I be using them everyday, and so on and so forth, before finally being handed a pair of shoes with a description on the tag seeking to justify the exorbitant price they commanded. It sounded something like this:

“Made using the same Dura-Edge flex-curve technology used by NASA in their space missions, our shoes rearrange themselves at a molecular level to fit the contours of your feet to ensure 360 degree dynamism and optimal comfort. Customized Hexa Polyhydrons, invented at our state of the art facility, allow you to jump from great heights and feel invincible.  Our micro fibrous, ambidextrous, jaw dropper, heart stopper, come a cropper material uses quantum aerodynamics to answer vital metaphysical questions that make them a perfect addition to your daily fitness routine.”

Looks like all that science fiction is reality after all, just not the way I expected it to be!

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.