Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Robots are secretly plotting to kill us. Or enslave us. Or, at best, they will take our jobs, one by one.
From science fiction written decades ago to Hollywood movies today, the relationship between robots and humans has long fascinated - and worried - people.
There’s now even a term, ‘robophobia’, to describe an irrational anxiety about robots and other advanced automation machines. And there are concerns beyond the ones stoked by watching too much Terminator.
Apple computer pioneer Steve Wozniak once suggested that robots would turn us into their pets. Physicist Stephen Hawking and tech entrepreneur Elon Musk have also warned about the dangers of going too far, too quickly, in developing ‘thinking robots’ with programmed intelligence that might keep evolving self-awareness, similar to the humanoids in the HBO series Westworld.
Hawking told the BBC in 2014 that ‘development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race’.
So there’s that.
Researchers vary in projections on how long from now, if ever, such a threat could exist.
For now, deaths by robot are very rare among industrial accidents. However, in 2015, a 57-year-old technician was killed by a robotic machine in a plant that makes auto bumpers, trailer hitches and chrome-plated plastics. Her husband filed a federal lawsuit, being contested by the defendants, alleging a malfunctioning robot took her ‘by surprise’, crushing her head.
As chief technology officer for a private-public effort to facilitate robotic solutions in US manufacturing, Professor Howie Choset of Carnegie Mellon University sees the fear of robots taking jobs making his mission tougher.
“You have to start this discussion with the baseline that automation and innovation creates jobs,” he said, by leading to new products and processes and the new jobs to make and operate them.
“Then you have to ask yourself, why would robots be different? And people are very quick to say: ‘Well, robots are intelligent, they do what humans can do,’ and there’s this fear that was sort of instilled by science fiction.”
Comparing fear of robots to 19th-century worries about steam engines, the professor added: “Robots are just the next generation of tools.”
Student Chris Boggess, 18, found the 2004 movie I, Robot, about a rogue killer robot drawn from science fiction written by Isaac Asimov eight decades ago, frightening, but he has come to understand and appreciate their potential through a robotics educational programme.
He said: “I like robots, anything about technology.” And if some day, thinking robots acquired the ability to threaten humans, he added: “I would probably try to make friends with them.”
