Did we just witness SkyNet going online?
Scientists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge have developed a robot named Adam that can perform experiments, and more incredibly, draw conclusions from those experiments.
For the first time ever, a robot has gathered scientific knowledge independently from people. This is a pretty incredible breakthrough. We can now see robots learning without people programming that information into them.
This seems fantastic until they become self-aware and start building terminators to destroy us all.
I kid, of course.
However, I do have a long-standing bet with a friend of mine dealing with robots and their possible effect on our future society, in the very-near term.
The bet states the following will happen by 2015:
- Robotics in the workforce being among the primary issues in the house
- Planes will start to be flown completely remotely and unmanned
- Unemployment will be at least 30%
- 50% of all minimum wage jobs will be replaced by robots
My friend is on the supporting side, I say it won’t happen – at least not by 2015. I believe that in the end the economy can adjust even if robots become as prevalent as he believes. I also believe that while robots might indeed take over a lot of jobs, there are some they just can’t or will not be allowed to do. Think about robot pilots. While perhaps an “improved” auto-pilot could be approved in the future that could basically fly and land the plane, I refuse to believe that no human pilot and co-pilot for that matter would be left out of the cockpit. I just don’t see people reaching a level of comfort where we trust an airplane entirely to a robot with no human “backup”. Sure, we have the Predator now, but that has no people inside. That makes all of the difference.
So who will be right? Let’s all hope I am. Unless you are ready to welcome our new robot overlords.
However, robots are a never-talked about reason for job loss. Check out this video from Drew Carey who points out that many, many more jobs are lost due to robots than have ever been lost because of out-sourcing. Sure, it is tongue-in-cheek, but the point still remains: Robots have taken over an incredible number of jobs. Of course, there are a lot of positives to that as well (which is why I don’t believe the 30% unemployment number – at least, due to robots).
My hope is that more nations will draft something like South Korea’s Robot Code of Ethics. This is based on Issac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and basically ensures that robots will not be able to harm people or allow people to come to harm.
While it is true we are a long way away from needing such rules in robots now (learning the genetic patterns of yeast, as Adam has done, hardly seems life-threatening) it wouldn’t be a bad idea to set these forth early, so that the standard is understood by researchers going forward.
Because I don’t think any of us want a robot server at McDonald’s gunning us down because we didn’t like our Big Mac.
Note: This was originally written by me and published at The Rising Tide blog.
