Why Technology Will Never Take Over The World (Probably)…

NGINX web server configured.

Website template chosen.

WordPress installed and running.

CSS changed to match company coloring.

Plug-ins added and working.

Content, content, and more content written.

Everything is operational and looking decent. Life is good!

Fast forward two months and the website is down. What the #%&!? After 15 minutes of digging and ftp-ing into the server files and, bingo. You find a plug-in issue exacerbated by a WordPress update. Your site has been frozen for the better part of a day.

This isn’t an isolated incident. This isn’t localized to websites. This seriously isn’t funny — “seriously you guys! Screw you guys, I’m going home.”

This is a reoccurring theme in technology today. Whether it is a plug-in, database, or an automated email filter — one misplaced line of code, or more often than not, one inappropriate update and you have been sent to computer purgatory.

And this, folks, is why we never need to worry about AI taking over and enslaving humanity. Because as soon as the entire computer server army with the IoT foot-soldiers are ready to pounce on us…BOOM! An iOS update comes through crippling the coup for good with a never ending loading whirligig.

On A Serious Note

We have 3D printers replacing human body parts — successfully. We have humans so displaced by the virtual world they don’t function productively in society. We have creepy Google search prompts that seem to know exactly what we are looking for. The idea of technology taking over humanity isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Maybe the information overload of things like cute cat pictures is their way of softening us up. But until we get our proverbial sh@! together, “Skynet” has no chance.

Containerization and Kubernetes is a wonderful start — much as Java was the agnostic key unlocking Internet browser potential. GitHub is also the cat’s meow when it comes to open code. Photonic chips promise infinite processing potential. Yet, we always seem to complicate everything too much.

Keep It Simple Stupid

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. Charles Mingus

Simple, deceptively simple, is the way we need to make all this tech function. So simple, in fact, that we become boring to our would be AI overlords. We haven’t mastered simple yet. Set up an Amazon account, spin up a few instances and you, too will feel the complexity pain.

Google Cloud Platform is doing a great job at making products and offerings more manageable, but the learning curve is no child’s play. It is similar to the 2000’s when attempting to install a USB device — it took an veritable act of god to accomplish. Nowadays, it is completely (well 99%) plug-and-play. This is what leaders like Google are attempting, making server instances so universal and cookie-cutter that a few clicks of a button and voilà! A fully stacked Linux instance running Apache, MySQL, and PHP is born. Oh yeah, by the way, if it is loaded in Container Engine, then it is fully elastic and managed. Add a few API endpoints to the machine learning product, and maybe we do need to worry.

To Google: “Don’t be evil!”

To the tech purveyors of futuristic dystopia: We’re a very long way off…