"I'm afraid I can't do that Dave".

The escalating debate over AI has become the cause celeb as proponents go about replacing tasks, jobs and functions that are/were handled or performed by humans.

In Stanley Kubrick’s stunning and prescient chef d’overe “2001: A Space Odyssey, one shot in the film chillingly foreshadows the brink upon which we are poised. 

In the film, while two astronauts quietly discuss their growing concern over their onboard computer, the HAL 9000, the camera slowly moves in on the “eye” of HAL. It becomes clear that the computer is lip reading, learning and, as we soon discover, becoming an independent thinker.

So much so that when astronaut Dave asks him to “Open the pod bay doors HAL” the computer replies in a cooly seductive and passive aggressive voice: 

“ I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave.”

Can’t or won’t? 

Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the film, read no further.

Dave realizes the only way to regain control is to dismantle the computer. As HAL “dies,” he descends into mournful mindlessness. 

Dave reclaims power over his fate and when retired, his embryonic self floats across the screen, ushering in a new order.

Unlike Dave, we cannot “kill” our HALs. 

But we must regulate their use and applications where doing so, like other advancements in say, weaponry, pharmaceuticals or malevolent use of the internet itself, threatens humanity and well-being.

While those who sit at keyboards and spreadsheets rub their hands over anticipated outcomes, they too should keep a watchful eye on their clever inventions. 

Who’s to say these entities might not evolve to engineer their engagers very redundancy?

 Reducing human essence and endeavors to mere data, who and what is safe from early or enforced obsolescence?  

Is this why we’ve yet to see populations on other planets in our solar system?

 Did their HALs outsmart them and the suspected glimpses we have of their technology are merely the robotic remains of civilizations long replaced by their own devices? 

Are we now the last outpost of humanity in our sphere, myopically making sure we are?

The money side of the AI debate will do nothing until/unless the ethics side becomes an active and palpable economic threat.

If every individual, group, organization, alliance, etc., standing for the rights of and protection of the copyright to our own essence, bands together and calls out the lack of ethics involved in the wholesale commandeering, replacing or replicating of humans with doppelg?ngers, we have a fighting chance to put guard rails around the very technology that could turn on every one of us and ever so patiently, with a watchful eye and a patronizing taunt, echo HAL and not “open our pod bay doors.”

 Causes and movements have efficacy and effect initiatives when they gain momentum, traction and become a financial, ethical and PR force with which to be reckoned.

This needs to happen yesterday.

Regulation or Cancellation?

It doesn’t get any bigger than this.