A NUMBER of recent books and movies explore the relationship between humans and robots. Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots documents the increasingly successful supplanting of human skills by robots. It's no longer just work deemed to be blue collar. Technology's job-eating maw now threatens the most expansively educated, as lawyers and radiologists are watching their work being exported to China. Human nuance, reduced to algorithms, can now grade university essays.
The movies Her by Spike Jonze and Ex Machina by Alex Garland raise the questions originated by Alan Turing - the so-called Turing test of robots for the presence of intelligence - artificial intelligence - demonstrating consciousness. The two movies are, by themselves, deserving of a future column, as they explore essential questions about the nature of the relationship between man and his creations. Even more important than a Turing Test to differentiate machine from man are the questions raised as to the nature of man in a technologic and mechanistic world.
Nowhere is the answer more pressing than in consideration of war and its methods. Recently, the US Public Broadcasting Systems documentary programme, Frontline, released an in-depth exploration of the CIA's use of torture and the report of the Senate intelligence committee investigation of the programme. You can see the Frontline programme here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secrets-politics-and-torture.
The origin of the torture programme indisputably came in response to 9-11. It was not long after that the first of what would be many prisoners was captured, Abu Zubaydah, whom the CIA initially claimed was a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda. He became the guinea pig for what was later described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" or more corporate speakishly, "IET" - that is, torture. He was waterboarded 83 times. None of the torture produced actionable intelligence and the CIA later admitted in its internal documents that he wasn't actually a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda; he wasn't a member of al-Qaeda at all.
When it came to light that CIA operative Jose Rodriguez had ordered destruction of tapes of torture, contrary to court orders, the Senate intelligence committee, under Senator Dianne Feinstein, began what became a six-year investigation. The study, based on six million classified internal CIA documents, contradicts the agency's claim that torture helped prevent a second attack after 9-11. The CIA, having failed to provide the intelligence that might have prevented 9-11 in the first place, has morphed into a secret para-military organisation including use of torture to deflect criticism should there be another attack.
