Humans Are Animals, Too

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Humans Are Animals, Too

Opinion

Humans Are Animals, Too

7/19/2006

By Terry Calhoun

How often do you have bright ideas that you are at least momentarily convinced would make you fabulously wealthy if you had: (a) the time, (b) the connections, and (c) the business savvy to make something of it? I’m not sure if this is a common thing for others, but it happens to me with some frequency. I have a ready supply of personal “idea inventions” that that are making someone else very rich.

I keep getting reminded of past “idea inventions” in the strangest places and at the strangest times. This time, it was in the San Francisco airport, between my flight from Honolulu to SF, and my later flights to Minneapolis, then to Detroit. In the middle of “Brainy Robots Start Stepping Into Daily Life” (New York Times, Tuesday, July 18, 2006, A1, C16), which I was reading avidly because the book I just finished also had a theme of artificial intelligence, I was reminded of an idea from 15 or 20 years ago which is now a commercial product.

It’s called Poseidon. The idea is simple: the water in a swimming pool is constantly scanned by computers, which identify certain kinds of movements of the bodies in the water and notify lifeguards when someone is likely to be drowning. It’s currently in use in Europe. I suspect that the main reason that it’s not yet in the U.S. is the same reason I thought it was an attractive idea in the first place. Once it’s in use in the United States it is likely to become a “standard” so quickly that every public pool will need to have one for liability reasons. (That makes it tough to introduce, because no one wants to be the first to spend money on something that no one has to have yet.)

A lot of my “idea inventions” from that period of time are related to child safety. Since my children are now 17, 21, and 22, it’s no surprise that was a theme of my thinking 15 to 20 years ago. (No one has yet brought the inflatable toddler head protection device to market.) The Poseidon idea was a good one. How cool would it be to own the rights to an expensive, high markup system that eventually everyone who operates a swimming pool will have to purchase?

Up until even this week, I would not have categorized Poseidon as an “artificial intelligence” (AI), but I now realize that was due to a mental block. I’ve read so much science fiction in my life that I have tended to reflexively think of AI only in terms of the highest levels of intelligence and functionality. You know…the kind of computer intelligence that could easily pass the Turing Test. (I guess I’m only human.)

Some science fiction writers and others speculate about AIs developing so quickly beyond the scope of human understanding that they rapidly evolve and go out and do their own things in the universe. In some future realities, they do so while protecting human life. In others, we’re just part of the environment and our created beings treat us just like we’ve treated our environment throughout human history. Scary, actually, when you think about how fast AI is coming about.