My Big Idea came to me on a soggy August day on Long Island Sound, captive in a lifeless O'Day Mariner, knee to sweaty knee with the houseguest I so wanted to please, sails slopping about uselessly, out of beer and potato chips, at the mercy of the small outboard which--of course--conked out. During the long embarrassing tow, my guest, who was a physicist, speculated that a "shear pin" in the motor failed, exactly as it was designed to do, to keep the aging and overheated putt-putt from cooking itself to death--a deliberately weak link that breaks the circuit before real damage happens. What if such a circuit breaker in my brain had stopped me from suggesting Let's go sailing! on a day clearly meant for an air-conditioned movie theater. Wouldn't it be great if automatic brakes in our heads shut us down before we shot off our mouths? Such purposeful failure is routinely engineered into just about everything--by engineers, or by evolution.

In the years leading up to, and through, World War II, animal behaviorist researchers thoroughly embraced motion picture technology as a means to better capture the daily experiences of their test subjects -- whether exploring the nuances of contemporary chimpanzee society or running macabre rat-eat-rat survival experiments to determine the Earth's "carrying capacity." However, once the studies had run their course, much of that scientific content was simply shelved. In his new book, The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life, Seattle University Assistant Professor of Film Studies Dr. Ben Schultz-Figueroa, pulls these historic archives out of the vacuum of academic research to examine how they have influenced America's scientific and moral compasses since. In the excerpt below, Schultz-Figueroa recounts the Allied war effort to guide precision aerial munitions towards their targets using live pigeons as onboard targeting reticles. Excerpted from The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life by Ben Schultz-Figueroa, published by the University of California Press.

A bestselling author has reportedly predicted that the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) could have an outcome that is more anticlimactic than even seen in doomsday movies. In his upcoming novel Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, author Yuval Noah Harari has described a bleak future for humankind, where instead of being completely wiped out by robotic beings, humans face a bleaker future of being rendered completely useless. A lecturer and historian at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, Harari believes AI will be successful in doing exactly as we fear. Machines will take over society and leave humans jobless and aimless. In fact, according to the author, the destructive powers of artificial intelligence have already started to take control and there are many areas where AI has performed better than people.

The idea of cyborgs running the world may seem like science fiction but may be becoming reality sooner than you think. No, there will not be an epic world war of us versus them. Instead, the shift from human to automation is slowly creeping into our society. Automation is already running assembly lines and even surgeries. From ATM's, pay-at-the-pump, self check-out, self-serve kiosks, order and pay at the table in restaurants, and all of the banking, shopping, record sharing, reading, socialization that takes place online, computers are already taking the place of humans.