Pulp Science: The Robot Apocalypse is Optional
Robots.
They’ve long been a sci-fi staple and are well on their way to being much more prominent in our everyday lives. As with other technologies, the way robots are portrayed in film and TV affects our real world view of them. These visions vary from story to story and culture to culture.
Americans generally have a paranoid picture of human enslavement at the hands of robotic overlords. The fear has saturated our culture thanks to movies like Terminator Salvation, where machines have exterminated most of humankind and run the planet.
You can choose to share this dystopian view of our future, but I don’t really know what good it will do you. At its core, hatred of robots is just self loathing, and fear of robots is fear of intelligence. God forbid that something exists in this world that’s smarter than us! Have the haters stopped to think that we could actually use the help?
Other websites may be joining in the chorus of fearmongering/film marketing this week by posting pictures of robots with guns and telling you that the end is nigh, but you won’t find that here. The robot apocalypse is optional, not inevitable.
Here are three signs that our future is not terminated…
1. Robots with Ethics
Yes, DARPA has commissioned plenty of robots with guns strapped to them. But, believe it or not, the idea isn’t just to set them loose on the battlefield and hope for the best. Right now warrior robots are controlled by humans, so that hardly makes the bots the bad guys, right? So, what happens when the humans are taken out of the equation? That’s the key.
Ronald Arkin, a professor of computer science at Georgia Tech, is developing software and hardware that act as ethical guidelines for robots in warfare. His book “Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots” argues that robots can actually be programmed to behave more ethically than humans on the battlefield. Why? More information.
“Ultimately these systems could have more information to make wiser decisions than a human could make,” says Arkin. “Some robots are already stronger, faster and smarter than humans. We want to do better than people, to ultimately save more lives.” Suck on that, Sarah Connor.
2. Robots with Artistic Skills
To get an idea of whether a society or culture is thriving, you can look at its art. “Art is the signature of civilizations,” as Beverly Sills said. So the following robots, armed with paintbrushes and musical instruments, may be the pioneers of the future A.I. Art Scene.
Shimon is a robotic marimba player that jams out with human musicians. It detects the beat and improvises based on the scale played by the human piano player.
Jackoon is a robot that paints like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Christian Cerrito’s collaborative robots (”Cobots”) are interactive artists, taking input from humans and using it to create line drawings, like The ShadowBot, which draws around shadows.
Crude drawings? Maybe. But these robots are young. A.I. art pieces will surely fill galleries (and homes) some day.
3. Robots with a Sense of Humor
Before robots can fully integrate into our lives, they’ll need to be able to converse with us in a pleasant way. One element that will enhance that communication is humor, or so says NEC, which is developing PaPe-jiro the robot comedian.
The launch of WolframAlpha has led some to start crying “Skynet”, but would an Artificial Intelligence hellbent on destroying mankind really quote Monty Python?
Has art, music, humor, and ethics stopped humans from exterminating each other? Of course not — and they may not stop robots from being destructive either. But it doesn’t help anyone to assume we’re doomed.
Efforts are required to insure that the path of technological development is safe. In order to mitigate risks while having the freedom to innovate, we can support the use of the proactionary principle, a simple decision process based on science rather than collective emotional reactions… like the fear of being hunted down by an army of T-800s.
