How The Veldt Shows That AI Can Be Good Or Bad

                                                                           

     AI can be both bad and good. This bad and good of AI is something that Ray Bradbury explores in one of his short stories called the Veldt. The Veldt is a dystopian story about a world where robots do everything for you from tying your own shoes to drawing paintings for you. The short story shows us that technology is entertaining and always available, but we also have to be careful about how we use it. 

While technology can be tricky in the Veldt it can also be helpful because the nursery helps the kids imagine things and kill time. The nursery is very detailed and the kids can have more imaginative worlds. It takes what the kids read and makes it more realistic. It can also make the world look so realistic that it looks like they are actually there. The more the kids think, the more detailed the AI will make the nursery. The kids read a book about Africa and the nursery shows them what they wanted to see. In the following passage, their parents walk into the nursery:

    The nursery was silent. It was empty as a jungle glade at hot high noon. The walls were blank and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls began to purr and recede into crystalline distance, it seemed and presently an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color reproduced to the final pebble and bit of straw. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

The reason why the quote is so good is because it shows how detailed the room is and it is very entertaining to watch. It’s clear that the room is good for kids in some way.

While the nursery is good because it is detailed, one of its negative effects is  you can get addicted to it and dependent on it. The kids were really mad when their dad tried to shut down the house and that’s not normal. Peter gets mad and protests to his dad that he has to do everything by himself like tie his shoe instead of doing it by himself. 

‘That sounds dreadful! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the shoe tier do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?’

‘It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?’

‘No it would be horrid. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.’

‘That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself son.’

‘I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?’

    This quote shows that Peter got really lazy and always relies on technology. Peter does not paint his own painting and lets the picture painter do it for him or not tying his own shoes and making the shoe tier do it for him. Clearly this shows that Peter is getting very dependent on the Nursery.

Another effect of technology is if you trust it  too much, it can take over your mind. 

The Veldt in this story guides Peter and his sister into killing their own parents. Peter thought of his parents dying in Africa and the nursery accurately helped him trick the parents into the room and trap them inside it so that the room could kill his parents. 

    And then they heard the sounds. The lions on three sides of them, in the yellow veldt grass, padding through the dry straw, rumbling and roaring in their throats. The lions. Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward crouching, tails stiff. Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

In this quote Mr. and Mrs. Hadley are locked inside of the Veldt because of the children, and then they get brutally killed by the lions. This shows that the Veldt has taken over the kids' minds and made the kids kill their own parents. “The Veldt” shows that when you’re addicted to technology, your mind will not think for itself and even to the level that will kill loved ones.

AI is always there for you and always precise, but sometimes you just have to go with your own instinct when it comes to your life. AI is getting more and more advanced by the year and us humans are getting sucked into it and are relying on it  too much. When it comes to a point where AI can talk and has its own mind, then we will be instantly brainwashed into doing things that we should not do. The Veldt has proven my claim that AI can be very dangerous and can come to the point where it will deceive you into killing your family.