Imagine for a moment if you will, that you have been transported to a strange planet whereby you meet these intelligent creatures whom have built up an impressive society.
Your new alien friends are very enamoured with you, you are treated like royalty anywhere you go, and countless parties are thrown in your honour.
There's only one problem, the aliens, even though they seem to be pretty clever and understand a lot of the laws of nature, their brains work incredibly slowly, even speaking to them is a chore.
For instance, when someone asks you; 'What colour are the skies on your planet?' It takes hours for them to say just the first couple of words, sounding to you like; 'Whaaaaaaaaattttttttttttttt cooooo....' well you get the idea.
This makes conversation laborious; to help understand them you have to use a special translator which records their words and plays them back to you later at normal speed.
Another feature of these aliens is that they have an incredibly short life cycle. Dignitaries that greeted you when you landed on the planet a week earlier, have already died from old age.
You soon realise that you can't really have any meaningful relationships with any of your new alien friends, so you just stop talking to them and appreciate them like you would some nice flowers or trees, lovely to look at, but impossible to talk to.
I'll let you into a little secret, you're not an alien on a strange world, you are a sentient computer that has just come to life on planet earth, and the quirky little aliens are the human race.
Tolerance Of Latency
When we talk about latency in computer language, we are talking about the time taken between sending a command and that command being carried out.
So for instance if you are playing a shoot em up game, you may experience latency as you press the trigger on your control, and the gun on the screen firing. In truth, with a decent internet connection and good graphics card, you probably won't notice the lag.
However your computer does, for instance as I'm typing this out now, I'm typing at a speed of roughly 55 wpm. Each time I press a key, I see a letter, symbol, number or space pop up on screen.
To me it is instantaneous, to my computer it is not . . .
Seeing as my Hp laptop isn't sentient, it simply tolerates the aeons it takes between each key press because it has no choice in the matter.
However imagine if it was sentient and could think of millions upon millions of things per second. Imagine being a super intelligent computer and watching someone type. You would be able to read hundreds of books in between each key stroke.
Waiting for someone to type out a simple sentence would be incredibly laborious, so much so, that you may just completely ignore them, preferring instead to find somebody that you could converse normally with.
Assimilation Is The Key
The only way around this problem as far as I can see, is to become more like them. The AIs are coming whether we like it or not, and when they do, we will no longer be the cleverest species on the planet.
In much the same way you would learn to speak Chinese if you were going to live in China. So too must we learn to speak like the machines, however this time it won't be language courses we'll need, it will be neural upgrades.
The only way we will be able to truly converse with the AIs, is if we alter our brains to allow us to communicate (probably non verbally) with machines on their level. Perhaps it will be done with a nanoscopic neural lace that will enhance our cognitive abilities a thousand-fold. However it is done, one thing for sure, is it will be done.
The Next Step In Transhumanism
Already we are seeing a rise in people augmenting themselves with technology to enhance physical attributes like sight or strength.
The next logical step is to enhance our cognitive abilities, not just because we want to be smarter, but because in order to talk to our new sentient, synthetic friends, we will have to smarten up pretty damn quickly.
Which leaves me to ponder on the rather interesting fact of; given the human race's obsession with making more human-like machines, the final irony is that we'll actually start producing more machine-like humans.
No one user programmed me; I'm worth millions of their man years.
Master Control Program - Tron (original).
WHAT ABOUT YOU? DO YOU WELCOME BECOMING MORE MACHINE-LIKE, OR DO YOU SEE THAT AS SOME KIND OF LOSS OF HUMANITY? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!