Our society today is a very interesting mixture of extreme cleverness and laziness. We have come to point where we can travel in space and explore other worlds. We can exceptionally fast and are able to talk to people on the other side of the world holding just one little device called phone. And yet we grow lazier by the day. There is a saying that laziness stimulates progress and this is perhaps true. How do you think the remote control appeared? Someone said one day “I am tired of getting up from my seat to change the channels and the levels of the volume of my TV!” Because we want to move as little as possible we have come up with various conveniences in order to eliminate the need of physical efforts. People used to plow with horses and buffaloes – today they do it with tractors. We have all sorts of machinery which substitutes manual labour and now we have our sights set on computers and artificial intellect (AI). Scientists have spent decades developing robots – simple and more advanced ones. We have also made huge progress in the field of AI. Combining the two together will mean that we have created sufficient robots. The truth is we would all love to have a servant or something similar to it who will not complain about our attitude or the amount of work we throw at them. But will it be all good if one day we have just as many robots as we have people on this planet. Will any problems occur? What if things take turn for the bad and everything goes to hell? We can only hope that it won’t but let’s discuss some obvious changes that will occur.
We will completely stop going to work
Manual labour will be completely gone. Many things which require a person’s presence nowadays will be done by robots. We already have advanced packaging machinery or cleaning supplies and tools which make our life easier. We have drinks and solutions bottled by streamlines etc. But what if some physical jobs also get replaced by what robots can do. Hiring workers will be no more and we will have robots cleaning the streets or driving our cars. We will also use them when we want to move and change locations. Removal companies will not send you a team of humans but robots instead. Or perhaps when you deal with junk and rid your home of waste, it will be handled by a machine and not a person. Since they have no muscles they will not get tired and the whole job will be completed in the nick of time. This also goes for sports as well. Unless we establish some sort of a rule that only people can play we will have either very boring or a very interesting world of sports. Why is that? Well if these machines are extremely intelligent they will likely never miss and will always make the right decision while playing. On the other hand their opponents will do the same and will always find a way to counter any actions. One thing is for sure though. It will not be as intriguing as it is now. There will be no trash talk and there will be no wrong decisions making sports really boring and streamlined. Come to think of it this will be the case with any field we put robots in. The absence of humanity at the workplace will lead everything being boring and grey. If robots serve us we will grow even lazier and will perhaps stop communicating with one another. We will be absorbed by ourselves completely.
There are some serious problems which wait us in the end.
Speaking of absorption imagine the huge problems we will have if we inhabit the planet with robots. First of all we are already very densely populated. If we have a few million or billion robots among us (because everyone will want to have their own servant) we will need larger cities and more urban areas. The planet will quickly become too small for all of us and we will need to move somewhere else. That’s not an easy task though. We will also have way more obesity. This is already a very serious issue and if we stop going to work and rely on a machine to run errands for us we will completely stop moving and will perhaps become fat. Needless to say this is not a good thing. We will also want to consume more and it is not clear where all these goods will come from.
And now what happens if robots decide to turn on us? We have all seen movies where robots go to a rebellion against humans and things rarely end well. Isaac Asimov came up with the Three Laws of Robotics just because of these reasons. Their goal is to protect humanity and robots equally. We will not quote them literally but just outline them:
- A Robot may not harm on injure a human being
- A Robot must obey orders from humans unless they contradict the First Law.
- A Robot must protect itself unless its actions contradict the First and Second Laws.
Even if they do not go to war with us how can we be absolutely sure that we can rely on them to always make the right decision? After all a robot is just a system, a bunch of wires and an electronic plate. Nobody knows when a certain unit will malfunction. We will have them drive our busses and fly our planes. We already have many cases in which terrible accidents have happened because of a computer failure of a vehicle or an aircraft. How do we know if a robot will stop at a walkway or a traffic light? We should probably stop complaining and try to deal with whatever we have on our hands for now. Having Robots everywhere can wait for now.