Science fact

I few days a go my wife bought a Netbook off Amazon for around £250.

The reason I mention this is because Gene Roddenbery, the man who conceived the TV and film series Start Trek, clearly envisioned these things three decades ago. I can say this with certainty because one of the original Star Trek films was run on TV last night and Captain Kirk was looking at one.

This really is quite incredible for a film made in the 1980’s when home PC’s were still a thing of the future and laptops, let alone Netbooks, Thinkpads and every other variation of portable computer was still a pipe dream. So incidentally were the stupid names that they all seem to be tagged with!

I makes you wonder just which examples of science fiction, presently viewed as inconceivable, are only a few years away from becoming common household appliances.

Already we have home helps like the irobot roomba and scooba for vacuuming duties. When you then take a look at the number of interactive home based computer games that are constantly invading our leisure pursuits you become aware of just how easily science fiction does become science fact.

The ease with which we accept these new technologies is, for me, the scariest part. No one questions the effects that they may have on social and communicative development, let alone intellectual development.

The other worrying thing is that as these devices become more interactive the intelligence required to make them function becomes ever closer to being a facsimile of human cognisance.

This may initially sound unrealistic, but in order to build a chip that can interact with our intelligence it needs to have a reasoning and level of perception that, in some way, mimics that of our own.

Right now this idea is light years away from what we deem to be an independent intellect. However, science fiction and science fact seem to merge at an ever increasing speed and perhaps films like Terminator and The Matrix contain ideas that we should start worrying about.