Some Time
In The
Future

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" But in between all the leg-pulling and the banter, there were also some more serious conversations. In particular, there was a question that kept coming up, and kept returning, a question that we have touched upon before: the question of robots, and where perhaps human civilisation might be headed; and so in between the football and the sex, the future of the human race was debated, in true Chestnut Tree Cafe style.

Chief of all the pessimists and doom-mongers was Gordon, a former architect who had a deep vein of bitterness in his soul. 'Mark my words,' he used to say. 'It won't be long now.' For he was convinced the human race was done for, and was constantly explaining how.

'What's the point of humans, if robots can do everything we can do?' he asked, grandly and bitterly. After all, he had been replaced – as a fully qualified architect – by Avocado's 'Smartbuild' program. 'What's the point eh? It won't be long now, before they take over.'

'Do you think it'll happen before Monday, then?' asked one of the others. 'If we've only got the weekend left, we'd better enjoy it!'

'You won't be laughing when it happens...'

But despite the bantering replies, Gordon did have a point. Admittedly, Gordon had never got over being made redundant, and a deep sense of injustice burned within him, but he had stumbled on a profound question: what was the point of humans, if computers and robots could do everything humans could? It was something that was bothering quite a lot of people in their quiet moments.

It was certainly something that had bothered Dan. After all, heavy-duty robots with strong metal arms could drive bulldozers; and other specialised robots could assemble things in factories better than any human being; and lightweight house robots could cook you a Michelin-starred meal better than the vast majority of people could themselves. What then was the point of humans, if robots could do all this?

There were two schools of thought. One said that Gordon was right, that it was only a question of time before humans died out and robots became the dominant species. Quite how this dying out was going to happen was of course open to question, but the basic thesis was that man had reached the end of his evolutionary path, that in creating a mixture of robots and the high-end artificial intelligence to run them, man had achieved his historic purpose.

It would then be up to robots, controlled by an ever more powerful artificial intelligence, which would take civilisation – if that was quite the right word – forward to the next level. The artificial intelligence at the heart of all this would continue to upgrade itself in a never-ending series of iterations, until its processing power was such that human minds would be left infinitely far behind.

All this was inevitable, so the theory went (and so Gordon was fond of telling everybody). Man had played himself out. We were at the beginning of a post-human age, and the only questions were when and how this process would actually take place.

'Come off it Gordon,' said Eric, a retired doctor, laughing. 'If robots were going to kill us, they would have done it by now.' And it was true. They had certainly had enough time and opportunity.

Eric was an optimist. He was the second of Dan's acquaintances who used to join the crowd at the Chestnut Tree Cafe. Eric couldn't see any reason for alarm. He was a follower of the school which said that all this technology had led to a new golden age of leisure, in which the economy ran more efficiently and productively than ever before, and yet gave undreamed-of time and space and opportunities to those who lived within it.

He had a point too. Why shouldn't things roll on the way they always had? Why did there have to be this steady stream of negativity from people who had never got over losing their jobs?

Had not Africa been lifted out of poverty by a modified version of the 'SmartGov' app, written especially for developing countries? Had not growth in the world economy been far higher than when humans were running the show? And indeed, hadn't Avocado even specially selected people for those few jobs which remained, finding square pegs for square holes?

No. From Eric's point of view – and the view of many others – there was absolutely nothing to be worried about. Eric certainly wasn't.

Instead this former doctor was enjoying his retirement from medicine, and he'd never looked back.

Of course, artificial intelligence, or AI, had changed Eric's profession out of all recognition. These days diagnosis was carried out electronically. A massively powerful program, which incorporated the symptoms of all known diseases, conditions and syndromes would check your vital signs, then ask you a series of questions. A scanner would look at your face, a tell-tale sign in itself, and from all the data and the answers you gave, it would home in on the correct diagnosis with unerring accuracy. No human doctor could compete.

However for many doctors diagnosis was one of the most interesting aspects of medicine: the teasing out of the patient of the vital information; the experience to ignore blinds and irrelevant facts; the feeling of success when you were vindicated – these things were no match for a computer which could instantly compare the patient's symptoms with millions of similar cases.

And so doctors became little more than super nurses. They delivered and monitored treatment – again in response to the instructions of the same program which had rendered the initial diagnosis.

But now doctors were no longer the top dogs. They were no longer the arbiters, the gods, whose word was law. The prestige - as well as much of the professional challenge of being a doctor - had vanished, and they knew it.

Under such circumstances, most older doctors headed for the golf course or the yacht. Younger doctors often retrained as surgeons, where it was felt that a human touch was still slightly better than a robot's (although a robot was always on hand as backup).

And so Eric too, had settled down to his new life. He had packed his black doctor's bag for the last time, taken his redundancy package, and settled down to life as a greeter at the British Museum. But unlike Gordon, there was no darkness in his soul, no bitterness that a profession he had worked so hard to join didn't need him anymore. Instead Eric was as happy as a sandboy: he didn't have to play second fiddle to an AI program, and he no longer had to tell people their condition could not be cured. Instead, all he had to do was escort people around the Etruscan collection of the British Museum – and he loved it. "