Right. 2020 has given us a pandemic, killer hornets, a twindemic, EF2 firenadoes, the worst mass killing in Canadian history, "zombie" hurricanes, and now ...
NEXT.
Now, we have already had a computer company called Next. Or NEXT. Or NeXT. Or something. But this isn't that.
NEXT is a new TV series, so my expectations were low anyway. NEXT has managed to drop below them. SPOILER ALERT: I'm not going to be too careful about spoiler alerts.
I've only seen one episode, but NEXT seems to be based on the concept of the Singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence, along with machine learning, genetic programming, self-rewriting code, and so forth, will produce a program that is smarter than we are at programming, and will then rewrite itself better, and so on, and so forth, getting better and better faster and faster, until there is no reason to keep people around except as power sources. (Oops, sorry, wrong franchise. It would have to be a pretty stupid superintelligence that would feed and house human beings as power sources. It would be better to just cover the agricultural land with solar panels until all the humans starved.)
There are plot holes in NEXT that you could drive a Tesla semi-trailer, or even an entire hyperloop, through. We start out with the superintelligence already taking over cars and killing people, so presumably it's already pretty much in charge. Then we have it manipulating kids, presumably in order to get the parents (or one parent) in trouble, which seems a bit of a wasted effort when you can just take over a car and kill people. We also have people getting to take cell phones into a super-secret research supercomputing facility. And, once in the machine room, which is presumably Faraday shielded (I mean, when you have a super-secret research supercomputing facility, wouldn't you?) they can actually make cell calls. We have running programs being identified by source code. OK, maybe a lot of AI type research is done with Python or something, but if you are trying to optimize an AI so it runs really fast, even if you have a super-secret research supercomputing facility, wouldn't you compile it? Would you just let it run on JavaScript the whole time?
If your superintelligence isn't connected to anything, how does it even know there is an Internet, let alone blackmail someone to get it connected? (And would putting a wifi hotspot inside your Faraday cage even work?) And how would it find out all it needed to know to work the blackmail?
Oh, so you wrote your superintelligent AI to run on specialized hardware? Well, if it knows how to program, it can probably figure out how to rewrite itself to use the Intel machines you've got connected to it, right? You think that was a safe security provision?
So far the characters are about as sympathetic as North Korean news anchors. "I don't have [Aspbergers], I'm just a [short form of Richard]." So it's hard to care if the superintelligence kills them.
I can't wait for a superintelligence that writes better TV series ideas or scripts.
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