Document text
Get Off My Lawn: Running out of time ... and not a second to spare Robert Galvin Sunday Jan 21, 2018 at 12:01 AM By Robert Galvin Mail Tribune As if we don’t have enough to worry about, now we have to start planning for the onset of something so hideous it could put an immediate halt to life on Earth. No, not robotic pole dancers … although we’ll get to them momentarily. Apparently (and I’m not expert), at about 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2038, we’re going to run out of storage bits on our computer systems — at least, in the way they’re calculated in Epoch seconds (to be specific, 2,147,483,647 seconds after the Epoch began on Jan. 1, 1970) — and the world will need to be rebooted. Or something like that. This immediately brought three thoughts to mind: • I’m going to be asleep at 7:15 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2038. Wake me when it's over. • We went through this with Y2K, for which some $300 billion was spent to prevent the aftermath of a digital disaster that never happened. • And, most importantly, the way things are going … ain’t no way on the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s great flat Earth that we’re making it to 2038. But, somehow, if we manage to get there and the end of Epoch time occurs, who’s going to flush our toilets? Because by then, we’re all going to own the internet-infused potties that were on display this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Yep, those babies will flush on voice command — as well as lift the seat (or … more importantly, guys … put it back down), program your bidet spray configuration, and play “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?” over its speakers as you're caught in the epic clash between sitting and getting off the pot. There, of course, were other innovations on display at CES 2018 — from a washing machine that uses an army of rubber balls to clean, to robots that fold your laundry; from a menagerie of the latest robotic pets (for about $2,000 more than a pet rock), to something called Somnox … a bot you take to bed that has a heartbeat, hums lullabies, and drifts you off to sleep as you cuddle it. There’s no word whether snuggling with Somnox would lead to dreams of electric sheep — or, for that matter, whether you’d be able to roust yourself awake at 4 a.m. should you be summoned by your computerized john. And, with that, faster than you can ask, “Isn’t that why I got married?” we move on to the robotic erotic dancers. These weren’t on display at the CES convention center — but were performing nearby, as organizers had the incredible good fortune to find a strip club in Las Vegas. The stiletto-wearing, bare-nekkid contraptions gyrated to thumping music and shimmied up what is (apparently) called a stripper pole. They are the creation of a British designer who rents them out for corporate gigs. He claims to have created the dancers — which have surveillance cameras for heads — as an artistic statement about the voyeuristic nature of society ... in case being in a Las Vegas strip club leaves you confused over what constitutes voyeurism. I’m not sure what makes me more depressed, but my money is on the likelihood that there is now incriminating surveillance camera footage of patrons tossing dollar bills onto a catwalk in the direction of robots grinding to a 50 Cent jam. No spare George Washingtons, meanwhile, were thrown in the direction of the artificial intelligence systems that this week out-scored humans in a reading and comprehension test developed at Stanford University. Microsoft’s AI scored an 82.650, Alibaba’s came in with an 82.44 and our fellow soylent green humanoids brought up the rear at 82.304 in an quiz that included 100,000 questions. Yep ... yepyepyep ... we have developed technology that will lift (or lower!) our toilet seats, lull us to sleep and mesmerize us into throwing real money at robotic versions of Stupifying Jones. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence systems are now more intelligent than us in ways that go beyond calculation-based equations and into reasoning and understanding. No wonder a Wisconsin company wants to implant microchips into its staff — harmlessly ... honest — in order to help workers with such difficult tasks as opening doors and buying cheese puffs from vending machines. I say let the robots worry about solving the Epoch time disaster of 2038. They’re the only ones who stand a chance. — Mail Tribune copy editor Robert Galvin is going to spend the next 630,990,847 seconds (give or take) answering emails to [email protected].