• Question: Do you think robots will ever take over the world?

    Asked by Tilly to Siobhan, Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie on 6 Mar 2017. This question was also asked by annacupcake101, Raechelle💋🦄🐬🌸, Sunnie👑.
    • Photo: Siobhan Duncan

      Siobhan Duncan answered on 6 Mar 2017:

      Dear Tilly,

      This is a cool question. Some people think they will, but I don’t.

      Let me explain.

      I think people who think robots will become our new masters, give engineers like me a lot of credit 🙂 I don’t think we will be able to build robots that are more clever than the people who designed them.

      But, I do think that robots will become a very huge part of our society, they will drive us around, care for our old people, save our lives, cure our diseases, grow our food, teach our children, clean our streets, work in our factories, etc…

      So in a way yes, we will become very reliant on them and they will take over many of the jobs currently done by people.

      But do you need to worry about evil robots? Not just yet 🙂

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      Not on their own. Taking over the world is a massive task 🙂 It requires robots to understand and operate in many different ways. Robots right now can do very specific tasks very good, but none of them can do more than a few things. And most are incredibly fragile outside of where they work (just pour some water on them, and most break).

      Also, they often cannot even talk to each other, because of how differently they are built.

      We do see more robots working in factories instead of people; we do see robots used in military; but we’ll need to see a lot more progress to start consider robots to be dangerous planet-wise.

    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      I don’t think that is going to happen anytime soon. Maybe it will never happen. In order for them to take over the world, they need to be intelligent. Yes, there is something called artificial intelligence, but is that actually intelligence? No, it is an engineer’s view on how a robot should think and learn.

      We do not understand how the human mind functions, therefore we cannot make something that is like a human mind. If they cannot think like us, they cannot control us.

      If at one point we will manage to make the robots intelligent, I think all the engineers are familiar with the three laws of robotics (Asimov’s laws), which basically says that a robot must not hurt humanity and must always put the safety of humanity first, and its safety last. If the robots will be aware of these laws all the time, they will never take over the world. At the end of the day, this is how we keep order in our society now… by using laws.

    • Photo: Katie Pavey

      Katie Pavey answered on 7 Mar 2017:

      That’s a great question and one I’ve asked myself a few times when I sit and watch all the robots in one of our factories working away all by themselves.

      I don’t think it will happen though, at least not for a long time. The robots are only as clever as their human programmers. We tell them how to move and how to make decisions.

      For example if we’ve programmed a robot to put red cars on a pile on the right and blue cars on the left what happens if you give it a yellow car?

      The truth is it will probably stop and wait for a human to tell it what to do!

      But if you think of your question in another way, how much do we rely on robots today? Without them we couldn’t make cars, package our food or pick out our online shopping orders – life would be much slower without them.

      So….maybe the robots have already taken over???

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