Opening Lines

POOR Robots. There’s always such pressure on them.

Approximately once a month, there’s a story that indicates that they are always either seen as the answer to all our prayers or the harbingers of the end of the human employment. They’re not asking for this attention. All they want to do is get on with their work and get a bit of lubricating oil every now and then.

Last week it was claimed that a computer program managed to convince enough people that it was human to pass what is known as the Turing Test. The program had the persona of a 13-year old boy from Odessa in Ukraine called Eugene Goostman. More 30% of people who chatted with Eugene online thought they were talking to a human.

You can talk to him yourselves at the Princeton Artificial Intelligence website. I was nearly convinced at the start. In response to the question “Do you think Cork will win the All Ireland?” He replied “It will surprise you to know that I do think Cork will win the entire Ireland.” When I pressed him on their chances in the football he said: “I’m not interested in football. I find it silly, frankly saying.” I mean, you’d find that attitude in a lot of parishes in Cork, let alone Odessa.

Robots are often trumpeted as doing the mundane tasks that will allow us to finally unlock our creative potential. The theory is that with everyone freed up from mundane jobs, they will have their minds free to dream up all sorts of creative things.

It might but there are a number of assumptions. First that people when freed up from work, people will put their time to creative use. A recent survey carried out by me on me shows this is not the case. Just this week, some time cleared up in my schedule and I used the time to watch True Detective. Nothing new was created.

The other assumption is that repetitive work in itself is not fulfilling or not creatively stimulating. I don’t know. Some of my most zen moments have come from picking potatoes, cutting weeds with a scythe, doing repeated copy and paste in Excel. The hardest time to create anything is when you’re trying to be creative. For brainstorming sessions instead of everyone gathered around a whiteboard they should be all sent out to hoover the office.

The downside of robots would be that they could take our job. Can a robot be a successful stand up comedian? I’m not convinced. They could probably be programmed to deal comfortably with asking if there are any Americans in the house or asking if the man and woman sitting next to one another are in a couple and then make a lewd suggestion to them.

But no amount of programming could prepare a robot for finding out halfway along the journey to do a gig, that the audience is not adults as you had been led to believe but children from 4 to 8.

Or when a drunk at your gig falls asleep in the front row and wakes up suddenly and asks out loud when are the band coming on?

I think my job is safe for the time being.