Artificial Intelligence and its Limitations

Well, I suppose you had to be there, or - at least - in fairly close proximity, otherwise it would probably have made no sense to you at all. At least, that is if you hadn’t seen one of them before and the way it can totally reconfigure your conception of what it means to be a person with an average interest in a decent portion of fish and chips.

Of course, the early experiments with artificial intelligence had not been all that successful. After all, despite all the millions of years of evolution we still have trouble sorting out natural intelligence, let alone wiring up the artificial type. I mean, there are still people out there who believe in all sorts of nonsense up to and including a belief – despite the evidence to the contrary - that Britain’s Got Talent.

Still anyway, as robots go it did have some sort of rudimentary intelligence, even if that was only limited to going to the shops for its owner. Expecting it to negotiate the tricky business of getting 3 portions of fish and chips and a fresh roe and chips, though, was perhaps – at this stage of development – a step too far, as was – quite probably – arming it with military-grade lasers.

Not to mention giving it a rather sketchy algorithm for detecting queue-jumping in other patrons.

Sending it out after the pubs had just shut was probably a mistake too.

An accident waiting to happen, someone said with all the usual post-event wisdom we’ve come to expect from news media talking-heads.

Although, as someone else with a more literal cast of mind who witnessed the actual event, did say, somewhat more accurately ‘it was an absolute bloody massacre.’

Still when it got back the chips were still nice and warm, and it remembered about the salt and vinegar - so it is too early to write it all off as a total disaster, despite the rather high final casualty count.