Are robots a threat to humanity?
Are robots a threat to humanity?
I’m Eleanor Sandry, and I’m from Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. And I’ve been thinking about human-robot interactions for some time now, and I’m also interested in the ethics around what people are planning to do with robots now and in the future.
So we’re already seeing a lot of debate around the use of robots and autonomous systems in the field of war, and maybe that’s the first place to start when we’re thinking about robots as a threat to humanity.
So the main issue there is the idea of putting robots into positions where they can kill of their own volition, where they are in control of themselves. One of the problems at the moment is that it’s very difficult for robots to tell the difference between friend and foe reliably. This has been a problem in war situations of course for many years, but it’s only increased when you think about putting robots and autonomous systems into those sorts of situations.
The question of whether or not robots will be a threat to humanity more broadly, though, brings us to considering all of the other technologies around robots and artificial intelligence and the systems that we’re beginning to see brought into use around the world, often in terms of facial recognition and surveillance. But also in other spaces, such as legal systems where robots may be used to decide how likely someone is, for example, to reoffend.
When we’re thinking about these sorts of autonomous systems, again, one of the things that people are concerned about is the lack of human oversight. And the reason that they’re becoming increasingly worried about that is because autonomous systems have been shown often to magnify the human biases that they have been trained upon.
While it’s tempting to consider a far future scenario where robots are maybe going to rise up against humanity, which incidentally the very first robots ever discussed did, in Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots. And that idea has become part of science fiction ever since, with the Terminator films for example. Maybe rather than becoming too worried about whether or not robots themselves are going to try to harm humanity, at the moment we probably need to consider the effect of humans making choices about those robots and how they’re going to be used.
These are the sorts of questions that we really need legal systems and governments to step up to actually monitor and decide how they want these technologies to be used for the good of humanity, rather than for harming people.
