I cannot in any way be characterised as a Luddite, one of those people who suffer from a morbid fear of technological advances as were witnessed in England at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

The term “Luddite” itself is supposed to have come from Ned Ludd, a Leicestershire worker who led his fellow proletarians to wreck machinery because technical innovations threatened workers’ jobs.

By the standards of my peers, I’ve done rather well taking technology in my stride. Consider this: When I was a toddler, my dad listened to music from his gramophone, a kind of rectangular box carrying a complex setup of coils and springs with a holder in which was placed a stylus that scratched a 78-rounds-per minute record (apparently made of clay or breakable wax) to produce squeaking noises that passed for music.

The radio set was another box with ivory knobs and an external speaker as big as the car battery of today. Today it would be condemned as child labour if you made a youth under 18 carry either the radio or the battery from one room to another. In fact these things were fixed and immobile in a certain area of the house. The battery would be carried outside the house to warm it in the sun when it lost power.

That’s where I’m coming from, but look at me now. This article is being written on a laptop, some of the references I’m using right now are from a tablet, right by my side, and the smartphone is never two metres away from me. I read my books online, listen to my music via Bluetooth speakers, and all the time the world is in my hip pocket.

In half a century I have been able to cram in my mindset as much tech knowledge as a person in another era would have taken five hundred years to master. And, lest you think of me as a hopeless braggart, I am far from being unique, for there are far too many of us for me to think I am in any way special.

But then my worrying department gets activated every time the issue of AI (Artificial Intelligence) comes up. You and I have been following the debates around the issue of the possibility (maybe probability) of manmade machines and their derivatives acquiring not only the technological sophistication to be self-motivated but to decide on their own what to do according to their own conscience (?).

The mind conjures up images of a future machine taking charge of your life.

We already have the driverless car, but what if your car were to determine your destination? Say, you want to go to the gym but the car says you’re going to the club?

Households are going to be crawling with robotics. A robot to open your door, another one to make your meals and lay the table, make your bed, draw your blinds, fetch your book and read it out to you, fix your nightcap. Will that necessarily make life more worth living than we know it today?

You can be sure that the concentration of an overkill of intelligence without concomitant morality –nobody is talking of artificial mores – could easily lead to catastrophic results. There could be a domestic cyber-war among all the gadgets and all the energy they exude in a small space, when most probably their owners will be relying on the perfect working of all the machinery informing their intelligence.

In West World, an old movie starring the late Yul Brynner, an AI Western (cowboy) scene is set up where real people can go on holiday and have fun playing gun-slinging games, only nobody dies.

The robots get damaged and they get fixed in the lab. Trouble is, a programme goes haywire and the robots refuse to obey the tech commands, and they are now on a rampage, with murder on their mind.

Warlords could also manufacture themselves a few million AI soldiers to fight their wars, and what is there to stop the Pentagon deciding all the wars America gets involved in will kill people from other countries, not Americans? A sobering thought, if you dare contemplate it.

It would be a very Brave New World, indeed, as the old book of that title hinted, but who would want to live in it?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]