Skip to main content

Dave: "Open the pod bay doors, HAL".
HAL: "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that…"

The 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey is notable for its scientific realism, and much of its science fiction is fast becoming science fact. Take RS Components, for example. The company is about to sell robots for the first time. The Igus Robolink desktop is a relatively affordable robot (around €1,500) and doesn’t rely on wires like older models but uses directly driven joints. But is this small step into the future really a giant leap into the unknown? Could it be as dangerous as HAL? In fact, does this spell the beginning of the end of humankind?

title

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The end of humankind? Stuck on a desktop? How can it be a threat? It’s surely like the old cartoon of a bunch of Daleks at the foot of some steps, one saying to the others, “Well, this certainly buggers our plan to dominate the Universe.” Or is it? Don’t forget, the Daleks have now evolved and Dr Who episodes are now filled with their airborne threat.

title

 

 

 

 

 

But Daleks are not real, I hear you cry. True, but the point is this: as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly sophisticated, could machines begin to influence their own evolution to such an extent that they move beyond human control?

Professor Stephen Hawking, world famous theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge University, certainly thinks so. “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race, he told the BBC. ”It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."


Hawking is not alone in his fears. Bill Gates has said, “I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern.” And billionaire Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, has said, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,” adding that 2001’s HAL would be “like a puppy dog” compared with the threats posed by, er, real-life AI.

titleScience fiction writer Isaac Asimov anticipated this anxiety in 1942 when introduced his The Three Laws of Robotics to the world, imagining them to have been written more than 100 years in the future. The first law states, “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” We’re well over half way to that hundred years and there’s definitely a growing uncertainty about whether our machines will obey these or similar laws. But maybe the problem with artificial intelligence is not that it’s too clever but that it’s too stupid.

Take the chatbot developed by Microsoft to learn from conversations as it interacted with 18-24-year-olds and which went rogue on Twitter, swearing and making racist remarks and inflammatory political statements. Although this shows the chatbot’s limitations, it also highlights something more worrying. Microsoft said that its racism was “indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it.” Alas, it’s more indicative of the crassness and idiocy of some humans. And given the human input, perhaps it is we who are too stupid; perhaps we should wait until we’re a bit more civilised before we go too far with AI?

We might be clever enough to build a machine that can think for itself, but we aren’t clever enough to be trusted to think for ourselves. Here’s a hair-raising – or rather, hair-eating - story that offers food for thought, as reported by the Korean Bizwire

titleA powerful robot vacuum cleaner caused an unlikely accident involving a Korean housewife, and required the intervention of a couple of paramedics. On January 3, a woman in her fifties had her hair sucked up into a robot vacuum at her home in the city of Changwon, South Korea.

On the day of the accident, she turned on her robot vacuum as usual, and laid down flat on the floor to rest, leaving the robot to do its job. The robot vacuum came around her relaxing on the floor, and suddenly sucked her hair into its nozzle. The vacuum stopped running one to two minutes after the sudden hair intake.The startled housewife called 119, Korea’s emergency telephone number. Fortunately, paramedics quickly arrived at the scene, and successfully disjoined her hair from the nozzle. The housewife suffered only minor injuries.The problematic robot vacuum had a nozzle with a roller inside, which sweeps and vacuums floors. The Changwon Fire Service Headquarters presumed that the vacuum’s sensors identified the woman’s hair as dust. The likelihood of this type of accident occurring is undoubtedly more significant in countries with a “sitting-on-the-floor” culture. Since Koreans love to rest or relax on a toasty, cleanly swept floor, exercising caution on using a robot vacuum is probably a good idea.

Robots and artificial intelligence – hair today; but what tomorrow?

title

noelprivett has not written a bio yet…
DesignSpark Electrical Logolinkedin