Robot Takeover? Everything Is A Computer Already

We are flooded by the Internet of Things—smart homes, smart speakers, smart plugs, smart fridges, smart robot vacuums, and so on and so forth—all hailed as the next must-haves. And there will be more. The market of connected devices is projected to reach $267 billion by 2020.

We make things “smart”, even though sometimes they do not have to be any smarter. Is it indeed an improvement to pay a couple of hundred bucks for a heating system connected to a smartphone app instead of relying on one with a cheap gauge? Ian Bogost, the author of the article and a professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, points out that very often the rationale behind automation ceased to matter. Turning an object into a computer became a goal in itself.

In an absorbing and well-penned long-read, the Atlantic grapples with the craze of turning everything into computers, showing that majority of people's lives already happen inside of them.

“The machines didn’t need to make people immortal, or promise to serve their every whim, or to threaten to destroy them absent assent. They just needed to become a sufficient part of everything human beings do such that they can’t—or won’t—imagine doing those things without them,” writes the Atlantic.

The author also confronts the current state of computerization with the ideas of robot apocalypse so feared by mankind, projecting that the reality might be far more mundane than the imagined Blade Runner-type future.

“The real threat of computers isn’t that they might overtake and destroy humanity with their future power and intelligence. It’s that they might remain just as ordinary and impotent as they are today, and yet overtake us anyway," concludes the author.