ROBOT DYSTOPIA
In the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs there was an article by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. It left me with a great deal of misgivings about the future of mankind. I was used to thinking about robots in a military situation, drones delivering packages from the sky, driverless cars , and robots that collected, interpreted and responded to massive amounts of world data. This all seemed to be entities that were developed to enhance the life-style of mankind. There was to be a clear boundary between humans and robots developed by humans.
But now it appears there is a scientific drive for humans to interact socially with a diverse system of robots. Before the reader decides it is time to end it all, this is not coming in the very near future, but when I think what man has developed in the past century, I am afraid that the situation arriving is not an impossibility. If you are a movie-goer you probably know of the movies “The Matrix” and “The Terminator in which intelligent machines attempt to enslave or eliminate humans.
Technological innovations bring on a certain amount of uncertainty, but man has always been in complete control. At first there were boundaries between robots and humans. They both worked in spaces isolated for men and robots. This ensured minimal contacts. We are breaching these barriers as it is possible that robots will share common work spaces with humans and may even interact socially.
The creators of these machines are humans with all the short-comings inherent in human behaviour. God knows we have enough trouble interacting with people of different races, nationalities, religions and economic status. Imagine an adaptive robot that lives with and learns from its owner. Who would be responsible if the robot creates injuries in humans, the robot, its owner or its creator . Is it even possible for a robot to be instilled with the ability to act independently as do humans? Is it possible to develop a post-evolutionary transformation that will replace humans with a hybrid of man and machine.? Is it merely a matter of time before human-robots couplings outperform purely biological systems.
And the next step of course are robots with feelings such as devotion, anger and pity. To be honest I would not want to live in such a world. It is terrifying. The author of this article asks for robot manufacturers to develop a set of ethics for these robots to live under. Man has not developed a set of ethics of existence in millions of years of on earth. Success now is very unlikely.
