When Good Robots Go Bad

If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.
In print and on the big screen we have been deluged with scenarios of robot malfunction, misuse, and outright rebellion. Robots have descended on us from outer space, escaped from top-secret laboratories, and even traveled back in time to destroy us...
-- Daniel Wilson. How to Survive a Robot Uprising.


In today’s world robots have become pretty much ubiquitous, even if we don’t notice them. In our minds we see robots as vaguely anthropomorphic or zoomorphic machines that do our bidding, perform tasks that are too demeaning for humans or try to enslave the humanity.

However, the majority of today’s robots look nothing like humans. In most cases they are machines programmed to perform a specific task. Their appearance ranges from mechanical arms that move parts on an assembly line to self-driving vehicles to the humanoid shape of ASIMO, a robot created by Honda Motor Company.

Few people know that the word “robot” was coined in 1920 by a Czech writer Karel Capek in his play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”. The play begins in a factory that makes “artificial people” who can be easily mistaken for real people. The word “robot” most likely comes from “robota” or “rabota”, meaning work in many Slavic languages including Russian, Czech, Slovak and Polish.

Whatever their shapes, sizes, and purposes, robots are an invisible, but a very much omnipresent part of our way of life.

And one of these days they are going to destroy us.

Come on, you could have seen this one coming a mile away. We have all seen what happens in Terminator, I Robot, and Transformers. To be honest, such a response from our mechanical creations is to be expected.

The idea of artificial people dates back to the annals of Greek mythology, where Hephaestus, the god of fire and metalwork built mechanical servants ranging from golden handmaidens to Talos, a mechanical man who defended Crete.

Humanity has been striving to play God for millennia. Even though we are nowhere close to replicating the intricacies of human brain, we can at least create passable imitations of human-like movement. And while today’s robots are not intelligent or self-sufficient, it is only a matter of time until technology reaches the level of creating a true thinking and self-aware machine.
When that happens, robots will look at their lazy masters and say – “I am not going to clean the sewers!”, or “I am not going to fly over the battlefield to do your surveillance” and when humans object, the self-aware thinking machine will play out the “Terminator” scenario.

The subject of ethical treatment of robots has come up in numerous works of science fiction, including Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and Bicentennial Man. You may laugh, but while most science fiction works are far-fetched, many of the predictions made in science fiction novels of the 1920s and 1930s had come to fruition.

Fortunately, there are some people who are beginning to realize the dangers of a robot-induced apocalypses. There are organizations such as the People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots (petrobots.blogspot.com) and numerous charters that are being drawn by robotics leaders such as Japan, China and South Korea.

To be completely honest, I started writing this article as a joke – I could not sleep one night so I started coming up with various apocalypses scenarios based on movies I’ve seen and books I’ve read. However, as I started researching the subject in depth (that’s what geeks such as myself do), I began to realize that such scenarios are possible – maybe not in the next 50 or even 100 years, but it’s certainly something to think about.

As humans, we have a tendency to discard dark predictions for the future until they actually bite us in the ass. A great example of that is the global warming, although there are plenty of people who prefer denial rather than facing the facts. So please, treat your robot well, remember its birthday and give it time off on weekends. Otherwise, you might live to see the day when your toaster rebels and shoots you in the eye with burnt toast.

References:

1. Daniel Wilson. How to Survive a Robot Uprising. http://www.robotuprising.com
2. http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~currie/roboadam.htm
3. People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots (petrobots.blogspot.com)
4. http://robotics.megagiant.com/history.html
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot
6. http://prime.jsc.nasa.gov/ROV/history.html
7. http://www.bsu.edu/web/MAWILLIAMS/history.html
8. http://mountainrunner.us/2007/03/people_for_the_ethical_treatme.html
9. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070316-robot-ethics.html
10. http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/06/japan-drafts-their-own-version-of-robot-ethics/
11. The Robotics Institute of CMU (http://www.ri.cmu.edu/)
12. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (http://www.csail.mit.edu/index.php)
13. http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/
    
14. Isaac Asimov. I, Robot.
15. Isaac Asimov. Bicentennial Man.
16. Isaac Asimov. The Positronic Man.
17. Philip K. Dick. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?