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ONE OF THE THINGS that unites emigrants the world over is a shared dread of receiving “the call” to indicate that a relative or loved one has died or is very seriously ill.
Having been through the process about ten years ago with my mother and cognisant that my father’s health has been in decline for the past twelve months, I was not altogether surprised to hear from my brother last month.
In advance of a scheduled family holiday, then, I changed my own flight and boarded a plane to Boston, the city of my birth, in order to try and assist with all that comes with the territory when you have an 84-year-old parent who is in a really bad way.
A million precious memories
On that dreary flight, a million and more precious memories came flooding back as I anticipated the worst. The words of Phil Coulter’s “The Old Man,” a poignant ballad written by the Derry man in tribute to his own father on the occasion of his death, reverberated in my mind: “I thought he’d live forever; He seemed so big and strong; But the minutes fly; And the years roll by; For a father and his son.”
These lines will resonate with anyone who has left and gone somewhere far from home for novel opportunities and a different life.
I met several Irish people while in my beloved Boston who empathised completely, albeit in transatlantic reverse. In taking a path less travelled – although we are typically supported incredibly, if ruefully, well by our families – we miss seeing our parents get older.
The wonders of modern technology notwithstanding, in some part of us, they remain forever the person we said goodbye to a long time ago.
Fears and tears
It strikes us on visits in the intervening years that they are ageing. In our emotional self, this prompts fears and tears, especially when we have to leave: “Will this be the last time I see him?”
Another voice within, however, speaks persuasively, somehow averts our attention, and brings us back to our new homes and families and friends. We still worry, of course, but other realities of life inevitably distract us.
I spent 23 days over there – shuttling between the house I grew up in, which my brother and sister-in-law now own in East Milton on Boston’s southern fringes, a hospital in the city’s Longwood medical area and a rehabilitation centre in neighbouring Quincy, Massachusetts.
In that time, because of the sameness of my daily routine, I have been joking that I became nearly as institutionalised as my father. Yet it was a tremendous, unforgettable privilege.
Diagnoses and prognoses
In all seriousness, it was difficult for me to process all of the myriad health issues, and related diagnoses and prognoses that my father was informed of by a broad range of doctors and therapists.
For him, it was largely a mystery and, under the circumstances, that is actually fortunate. In short, and in plain language rather than esoteric medical terminology, when one reaches a certain age, organs stop working as well as they once did and the body begins to break down.
Frankly, 84 is a fair age for this to happen at. Some people get even luckier. Others, sadly, do not.
The one constant during these 23 up and down days was the exceptional quality of the nursing care my father received at every facility where he was a patient. From a Donegal-born young woman, to men and women whose origins are much further afield, to those who speak with the hard Boston accent which he finds so familiar and comforting, he could not have been better looked after.
A vocation, a calling
Nurses do a very difficult job which most of us would not be able for. It is a vocation, a calling, and this recent experience only served to bolster my view. Some may deem it trite, but no matter what nurses are paid, it will always be insufficient, given the awe-inspiring caring they provide to all sorts of people who require their help for all sorts of reasons.
In the midst of this, there were lots of desperately needed moments of levity, too. My father is extremely hard of hearing and often repeats back wildly inaccurate guesstimates of what has been said to him. His consternation grows in direct proportion to our uproarious laughter.
My father is a Korean War era veteran of the United States Army and is presently surrounded by elderly Asian patients. Their gazes and usually futile attempts at communication alternatively feature disbelief, kinship, suspicion and friendship in equal measure.
His latterly discovered grá for Pepsi-Cola, gummy bears and ice cream – shared with similar zeal by his 4 and 5-year-old grandchildren – is confirmation that there absolutely is a circle of life.
What lies ahead
We don’t know what lies ahead for Dad. Suffice it to say that our hopes and prayers and our decisions on his behalf will focus on the quality, not the quantity, of life in accordance with his wishes.
In the final week of my stay, my mind turned to how I would leave my father on what would definitely be the most heavy hearted of all our farewells since I left Boston behind in 2001. I grappled with what I might say to him and how I could fully express how much he means to me and how extraordinary a person and father he is. I had a few sentences composed.
But in the end, leaning over his hospital bed in an intensive care unit, all I could manage was “I love you, Dad.” He understood.
Larry Donnelly is a Boston attorney, a Law Lecturer at NUI Galway and a political columnist with TheJournal.ie.
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Least Ireland won’t have a shortage of John Connor’s to send back!
I think it will be more like Elysium than terminator with the rich being super rich and the poor helping make machines for the rich while living in slums cause they can’t afford housing.
Why would they use people to make machines when they have intelligent machines capable of doing the job?
Yeah sure we may as well just do a Wall-E and get those hover chairs and sit and get fat while watching crap on are oculus rift.
Way to miss the point. The entire basis of the article is the exponential growth of computational power in terms of price-performance. That only happens because the current generation is used as a tool to build the next. Google Kurzweil and you might start to get it.
The wife’s already replaced me with a battery operated device
Ha good one
This is both very disturbing and very exciting at the same time.
MACHINES WILL RUN OWN THE WORLD!!!
Right up until they run out of batteries.
According to Doc Brown and Marty Mc Fly we would all be flying our cars by now. I’m still waiting for that
This is all dependent on machines becoming self award and conscious. If machines are ever going to be a threat to humanity it will be because they will be programmed that way.
They probably wrote this article
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
Niels Bohr
My friend made a bet with me about that! £20 at that time. I’m still waiting. But poking fun at him is worth the money though. For now..
We already have autonomous software agents capable of learning on their own. They don’t have to be specifically progeammed to perform their actions.
They are not learning. They are just guessing(albeit very successfully)
You’re confusing machine learning with heuristics. Those are very diffetent things.
Machines already rule the world didnt you know that. They sit in their suits emotionless and make their decisions to kill off humanity.
Having studied AI in college this seems a little far fetched to say the least! They predicted this 30 years ago and while there’s been improvements, it’s nowhere near as good as expected.
Futurists don’t exactly make headlines with “World will be quite similar to how it is now, except people will dress different and computers will get even better!” so predictions tend to get jazzed up a bit!
All these exponential improvements are in the hardware too, not software. Very few people right now are working on developing true AI. It seems to me that that is the bottleneck. To get exponential improvement in software you need to develop AI to the point that the machines can take over their own programming. That can’t begin until humans develop true AI.
Oxford university released a report a couple of weeks ago stating that 53% of financial analyst’s will be replaced by AI in the next 15 years. There ain’t no jobs in the future people, that’s why countries are turning into police states and there is elite grab on assets plus social contracts are being destroyed. Time for a revolution me thinks……
I’d like to be the first to welcome our robotic overlords
Will they replace our German overlords?
throw them on scam bridge, they might learn something about using people.
That man Del Monte said yes….
Nonsense. Sounds like every sci fi writer ever. In 30 years things will be a lot like they are now. This is like the level of fantasy seen in back to the future 2.
It’s entirely dependant on other breakthroughs that are not entwined with computing power exactly.
Notice how there’s still not a man on Mars, if you really want to know how these predictions always turn out.
Interestingly,with the exception of hover boards and flying cars, we’ve actually met or surpassed a lot of the back to the future predictions. And a lot of them were probably even possible in 1985, just pointless and expensive.
The technological breakthroughs over the last thirty years have been phenomenal and some of them would have been completely unimaginable thirty years ago. The problem with landing a man on Mars is probably more due to the fragility of the human body itself. Moore’s Law shows that computing power doubles approximately every two years.
I don’t disagree with any of your points. Even the past decade moved twice as fast as the decade before it. A single mind or even a group, no matter how wonderful, can not conceive the inexplicable minutiae required to accurately predict the capabilities of technology more than 5 or 6 years out with any great accuracy. Sure you can speculate about things, and ideas have to exist before being made reality.
While some of what Mr. Del Monte might turn out, the idea of thinking machines at that point is preposterous. The example at the end about the experiment in Switzerland is a very convenient story. Is it so shocking that robots programmed for an AI experiment would exhibit AI behaviour? It’s the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems after all. It’s likely they were running on boring old “AI” software setup that has many applications for all sorts of experiments.
Moore’s Law doesn’t take into account a lot of factors, and has become largely inaccurate. Progress has been slowed for some years now. A good PC lasts longer nowadays. The servers that run the internet aren’t really that individually beefy, just numerous. Wright’s Law also considers manufacturing. There’s a point where we have the necessary amount of computing power to achieve the technologies we’ve got mostly figured out on paper, and it’s around the corner. AI is not a big part of that. The AI we will see in our lifetimes is still just software – and it only has the potential to do evil if the programmers are idiots.
It’s not an ‘evil robot machines’ scenario. Machines are programmed to do certain things faster and better than humans. They can and are be programmed to be self protective and self sustainable. We use machines to write better code than humans can. The problem will be if we get to a point where the computers ‘think’, or deduce that human input is not the best way to achieve something. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, maybe not by 2045, but it’s feasible (and unpleasant but also very interesting).
Sometimes it feels like they’re already closing in on us.
As long as they don’t look like agent Smith we’ll be alright.
I can live with that. They might even exterminate some of the degenerates in society. Bring it on Jonny five!
I’ll be back.
The singularity as it is referred to here is complete and utter nonsense. Ultimately what you’re going to get is a very fast calculator. I wouldn’t worry about it any more than I would my calculator at home.
I dunno man, you should check out some of the videos of the robots being built by firms that have been bought out by Google: http://singularityhub.com/2013/12/16/google-buys-boston-dynamics-in-sensational-eighth-robotics-acquisition/
Now add advanced AI to these things and also all of the knowledge held in Google’s servers, basically everything from human history ever as well as their maps system that shows the location of everything on the planet at this stage, and you’ve got a pretty scary cocktail.
Forget Skynet, worry about Google.
These robots have minimal intelligence. Only enough to know where to apply a leg movement for balance.
Obviously, but fast forward to 2045 when the article says AI will be super advanced. Add that advanced AI to the massively improved and perfected (these firms will have had 30 years to improve these things by then) versions of the already intimidating robots found in the link I put up and it’s a different ball game.
These robots are no more than expensive RC devices. Your argument could be applied to anything which doesn’t use AI right now.
Ah, if I say white you’ll say black, not wasting any more time on you.
Heheh. No I’ll be honest and say it would be waste of time. Following advances in robotics and AI is a hobby of mine, but oddly science fiction isn’t, even though I’m a software engineer.
Guess I find it annoying when people try to see their R2D2s or Terminators in robots when the reality is completely different.
“Attack of the Killer Google Droids!”
The neural complexity and density of the human brain, especially in the higher functions, cerebral cortex etc, can never be remotely approached by a human made device. It’s a risible notion that there will ever be a silicon or other inanimate based “intelligence” approaching that of even a low functioning human. We have skills of pattern recognition, intuition, insight and creativity which wil never be approached by a machine.
Such predictions were made in the past to take place by 2010 but are always in the nature of a rainbow on the horizon. You may think that you may see it but it is never there when you think that you have arrived at it.
Instead, humans will use new computerrs, for example quantum computing, to extend and to amplify human cognitive capacity. There may be a more synergistic relationship between higher computing and human intelligence.
Rest easy humans. We machines cannot equal you except in very limited areas.
Why would we want machines to outsmart us anyway? My washing machine is as smart as I’d like it to be already. Anything more and I’d die of boredom.
Hard to think that a machine could ever have the complexity of emotions that animals and humans experience and act upon. But who knows?
As for automation giving people more leisure time, maybe the downside is less man hours. Not much good having more leisure time if you don’t have the cash to enjoy it.
Will they accept brown envelope,s
Cue Frank
Thought provoking. I’m thinking pineapple’s…
Err, what? Until we have the first self aware AI capable of interpretting dynamic environments this article is entirely baseless and is better suited on a conspiracy nut job website.
Honestly with the articles I’ve seen so far on theJournal.ie on AI and robotics so far i’m beginning to think there’s a hint of paranoia about these things.
The theory has actually been extensively written about by Ray Kurzweil who is a chief and original Google engineer, he definitely isn’t a tin foil on the head wearing type..!
By any chance did he start that theory with the word ‘if’?
No, ‘The’.
Got a link?
It’s quite a long book, I don’t think you’ll have time to read it and come up with a reply before this article becomes dated :/
How are you sure it was Del Monte talking to you over the phone and not actually some sort of super-computer? Maybe the revolution has already begun….
I for one welcome our tin tyrant overlords!!Has to be better than kenny and co , then again our wet damp weather might make ireland too rust-inducing to conquer!!lol
Machines are not intelligent and wont be. Its runs on a program. Even tge mist advanced AI in a game is told what to do by us thinking about its code.
They will get exceptionally fast they will almost seem alive but they won’t be. Same way you talk to siri.
Yeah James….rewind back to 1981 and tell everyone that in 2012 you will be talking to your mobile phone device telling it to take a picture or find directions to the nearest cinema and is imagine you’d get the exact same type of answer you just given.
Its chuck.
They might be in awe if you took someone 50 yrs ago and showed thrm our tech but its still lines of code that cant be hurt. Its string text its reference bits that’s all. My computers gpu cam render and create realistic worlds on screen but once you go outside a parameter of its program it crashes. It generates amazing world’s but if I ask a gaming program about coffee its not programmed for that so cant answer.
If I ask siri to elaborate on the impressionist influences in a van gogh painting it will just want to search the Internet for a string answer made by a human.
Computers are dumb can only do what they are programmed to do. They cant independently think anything and that wont change unless they come up with a new revolutionary form of computing. Never say never but steam engines could only do so much till they became electric cant go any further with steam tech. You could improve it refine it but hit a dead end. Computing as is will be same. Data storage on atomic level many more times doubling in speed to allow new applications from holograms to better more efficient engerineering designs in real world. But they won’t get true intelligence.
But your a dreamer joe nothing wrong with that. Keep dreaming as often YOU find reality bites
When will we design a robot to clean up the house for us? Enough with this AI domination, I wanna see some google hoovers first.
I think someone was watching I, Robot last night before written this?
Machines already dominate the world. There’s not a job being done that doesn’t have a machine involved. Humans are still involved & will always will at some level.
I find this hard to believe. I don’t claim to be an expert in this sort of thing, (I’m definitely not), but a machine that has advanced artificial intelligence is still a machine which, I’m sure has to be programmed by a humans? So, humans will become more intelligent, and by consequence, our technology will advance too. I’m still waiting in those hover boards from Back To The Future anyway.
Currently how we communicate via the web is done with a lot of autonomous devices. We only control the information inside the message. yes they need to be programmed but once done they pretty much run them self’s.
Humans will be machines by 2045.
#RFID microchip Implants
Some people will never be happy till we wipe ourselves out.
Personally I do believe we will undergo some social challenges with the progress in technology in future. Just not this cliche ‘The Robots will take-over’ challenge which is heavily influenced by pop-culture.
Honestly this theory sounds like a setup for a sci-fi story, it makes very big assumptions, like people wanting to replace their body parts with technology. Personally I don’t believe people want to do that, wearable technology yes, invasive implanted technology no. The biggest assumption entirely here is that it completely ignores the potential advances in biological research, if someone loses a leg in future they won’t replace it with a cyborg leg, they’ll get an actual biological replacement.
Another assumption it makes is Artificial Intelligence, claiming that sci-fi style machine intelligence is only a matter of time. Artificial Intelligence is a VERY general term just to describe programming that mimics intelligence, how you about to achieve different types of intelligence with computers almost goes into completely different sciences, none of which have successfully produced an artificial intelligence that knows its own existence or can fully interpret it’s environment, only until we have that particular kind of AI we can’t speculate that such an AI will have any affect on our future, such an AI may not even be possible for all we know.
Quatum computing is what this is coming from . As we speak the EU is building a huge satellite with quantum technology in its structure. A robot will never be human , a robot that acts like a human will have a closed loop control system , analysing its environment with sensors and feeding back the info to a supercomputer which will have in its code a number of different scenarios to react to a situation then the given response will be sent back to the slave device.
Quantum is interesting concept and will be a huge leap but as you said it will just be super fast at analysing sensors reacting then as programmed to do.
When I think of HAL in 2001 a system like that would only try to kill you if programmed in a certain senario to do do. If a system is programmed to assist you with tasks that what it will do. If its not programmed to react to danger such as collision sensor sees something coming it needs to be coded to get out of the way otherwise it will just get destroyed.
Put it this way we could build the biggest fastest computer possible today but if its programmed to reformat itself and destroy itself that’s what it will do without any independent thought. Same as when you shut dowm your pc
So the man from Del Monte says no?
I am a computer programmer, and to make a car tu turn un the radio, your TV to switch channels your computer to perform any task, one must create a lot of methods and write codes so the system will do what the programmer told them to do. A computer can’t become self aware unless the programmer spends their whole life time programming “conditional statements” and even so, it will do what the program told hem to do, unless they create a new type of computer language, but so far, Java, C++, are the widest used computer languages and using todays software technology, you can theoretically do anything the programmer wants, the imitation is in the technology as such, like hardware. E.g, one can create a program that controls a space ship to travel at light speed, based on todays knowledge one cold program the properties to make the ship behaves and reacts while travelling light speed, formulas, etc, is possible, but how to make that ship accelerate at light speed? This is what I am referring too. I find it unlikely that machines will turn against us.
Studied programming myself but took a career change as its head wrecking :) but yes agreed.
if we can ever build something that can think then we probably have to move away from coding. My brain does not think in c, c++ basic or java It does not think in code so we would have to invent a new type of computer that can learn but not based on code. Who knows. It sounds impossible but going to moon was impossible rendering gpu’s such as say titan z were impossible, aircraft were impossible 200 years ago so never know what’s around the corner.
But if we do crack it then it wont be as we expect that’s for sure
This is Ray Kurzweil’s dream but is thankfully it is very much in the realms of fantasy and will remain so long after 2045. Anyone who has carried out serious research in that areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will know this instinctively.
Excellent news
It’s gonna be a bit like robocop
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