Urban Tech Guy Blog

Will an IBM computer be your next mayor?

The OPs center in the scenario described in this piece sounds like the Ops centers that the military or NASA has in place.
However, on a smaller scale, these Ops (Operations) centers are already in place in many businesses, though they are more targeted and are geared to serving the best interest of the business & clients.

Another aspect from this scenario reminds me of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In it, the ship’s on-board computer controls most of the key operations of the spaceship, and it also talks.  HAL, the on-board computer assures the astronauts that it is, “foolproof and incapable of error.” Yet once it disagrees with a project the astronauts set to undertake, HAL displays human emotions and takes action to prevent the implementation of their undertaking.

According to this movie and similar ones, it is that there can be potential problems or dangers with ceding too much control to machines. They can begin to be more concerned with their own preservation or to commit actions that require eliminating variables to preserve their preconceived notions of what’s best for humanity, regardless of quality of human life or even innocent human life itself.

A similar but more recent movie is; I, Robot.