Cyberdyne is Out There Working, Right Now
Couple things. One was a discussion about GPS automated direction-giving, in-car and, in my case, on-phone. We talked about how everyone pretty much agree that GPS will get you there, it will just send you there in weird ways. It’s worth double-checking the directions, in other words. However, we concluded that in 10 years, it might be a different story. The ability to navigate will have become an obsolete skill.
The other thing was hearing on This Week in Photography that photographers are feeling pressure from computer generated images. That is to say, product shots that used to be done by whole teams of humans are now being made in CGI. Presumably the next step will be for human model shoots to be replaced as well – think of the poor unemployed models!
It’s tempting to argue that some areas will never be taken over by the machines. For example, we’ll always need photography for the news, right? Well, I saw a CGI re-enactment on US news recently, in a story about the arrest of the suspects in the recent domestic terror incident. It was horribly done (and lampooned on the Daily Show), but nonetheless it was there – the prospect of news without the footage.
Everything seems normal, but in the background that exponential evolution keeps on tickin’.