Purple Bubble by Arockia Rexi F

 Every 90’s kid has a moment of realization. A moment to bring them to reality where technology is not something new but transforms every second, engulfing their whole lives but makes it better somehow. When a 5 yr old asks your phone password to play subway surfer, you realize the enormous change your parents had to undergo to adjust to technology. The moment reality struck me hard on the face was when watching the Ironman sequel for the 100th time. Losing myself in the trance of the marvel universe, busy saving the world brought me to Jarvis.“Shall I call Ms.Potts, Sir?”, is one of the most emotional moments for any marvel fan. He was just an intelligence system in the beginning, but then he became part of the team. He became a part of the team, not in a jiffy. But better every time. He learnt from his mistakes, tried to understand emotions, observed the world around him but after all he is a Machine. If these qualities were imbibed in a homo sapien we would have tagged him as an exemplary human. After all he is still a machine. Jarvis made me realize that the gap between humans and machine is being bridged by the growth of artificial intelligence. Why this fascination? After all he was a machine crafted by human hands but emoted better than his creator. The unmanned drones or self-driving cars which make life-altering decisions, that we humans hesitate to take every single day. Do we escape the hands of consequence with the help of these systems? But it still brings a sense of threat to humane originality. In terms of the hierarchy of creativity, we earthlings, submerged with greed and creativity, managed to stay on top but when a machine can write and create original content in a humane nature, where will we be? A sense of fear engulfs me. I remember laughing at ‘The Origin’ by Dan Brown, where he had a futuristic view about artificial intelligence, which was mocked by many, criticized by few but thought out by some. The book represented humanity in a blue bubble, and machine intelligence in a red bubble. Based on the protagonist's analysis, in the next few years the red bubble consumes the blue. Looking around, our dependencies and faith on technology stand testimony for the loss of our humanness and trust in the beings around us. ‘If man knows the day he dies, he will stop living’ said Poet Kannadhasan, and the systems that predict the future are so ordinary that they do not fascinate us anymore. The choices we will make are predetermined, does it make our choice then? Do we have a choice? Or is it a massive illusion where the puppets never realize who they are? While the questions were twisting and toiling in my miserable little brain, courage made me move onto the last chapter of the book. The blue bubble and red bubble became a purple one. Machines did not dominate humans but became one with them. But how? When we are not capable of holding onto things that make us who we are, how can we live with the ones who depend on us for their lives? The answer was simple, the qualities we are losing are our creativity, trust, risk but some qualities still prevail that put us apart. When sweetie, a computer-animated artificial intelligence child robo, shed light on the growing rate of pedophiles in online platforms around the world, it gave me hope. A hope for a future where the intelligence systems set us free from falling for our doom.