The Internet of Things, and the coming Robot Rebellion

Op 4 oktober jongstleden was Steven Pemberton de hoofdgast op het symposium Declarative Amsterdam. Een symposium ter gelegenheid van zijn eigen pensionering bij het Centrum voor Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). Dat opende hij zelf met zijn lezing over XForms.

XForms is een internettaal die de snelheid van programmeren tot wel 10 keer zou kunnen versnellen. En Pemberton werkte aan nog veel meer programmeertalen. Hij kan zonder enige terughoudendheid een webpionier genoemd worden.

Gelukkig gaat hij niet op zijn lauweren rusten en zal Freelance Fridays nieuwjaarsbijeenkomst opnieuw opluisteren met nieuwe aflevering in de inmiddels lange reeks lezingen.

Voertaal: Engels
Primary language: English

Steven on his talk this year:

“Technological changes in society seem to be accelerating: in fact you can go back tens of thousands of years and discover an alarming pattern: they are accelerating at an exponential rate. If they were once happening every 100 years, then after 100 years, they were happening every 50 years, and then every 25 years.

If you follow this line, you see that it converges on a time, apparently not too far in the future, where paradigm shifts are happening daily.

How can this be? One suggestion is that that is the point where computers become smarter than us, and it is the computers doing the design, not us. By then, the whole world will be interconnected by the internet of things; will we be ready for a world where we are no longer the smartest? Will computers remain at our service?

And can we prepare in time? There were already warnings in the 60s about the impending climate crisis, and we are still not really doing anything. We are fundamentally slow-moving. What are the chances we can prepare for the AI crisis in time?