Man-robot co-existence could be closer than we think

When we were young we wished a lot of the science fiction we read would come true. Growing older, we began to hope that some of it would not – at least not too soon. Such is the speed of human evolution that, within the span of a lifetime, once-fantastic dreams are becoming real. But not all of them appear as pleasant as we once thought.

Recent reports on robotic technology suggest that the day is not too far off when actual R2-D2s and C-3POs brush up against us on the footpath. In fact, those clumsy “Star Wars” robots would more likely be outnumbered by far better versions, even better than Data, the “Star Trek” android.

According to the New York Times, the “industrial era” of robots as mere machines in factories – kept separate from human staff for safety reasons – is over. “More and more, robots are beginning to imitate, and look like, humans,” the Times says. And they are being made to perform human tasks as well, not just repetitive mechanical work.

Already there are prototypes that take our breath away. It’s no longer a matter of whether humans can do the job or not, but of when humanoid robots will be cheap enough to mass-manufacture to assume the task. (This is assuming that “manufacturing” is still a politically correct term when that happens.) Also, it’s no longer a matter of how much a robot “can” do, but of how much we humans want it to do.

Like contraceptive pills, genetic manipulation of food and cloning mammals, robotic technology will eventually face more ethical challenges than technical ones. It’s one thing to lay off an entire team of proofreaders at a magazine thanks to automatic spell-checkers. It’s another to replace an entire farming and industrial workforce with non-humans.

And we are not talking about unskilled labour here. Robots can be programmed to make increasingly delicate decisions. To argue that robots are not equipped to make human decisions because they lack the necessary emotions is outdated, or soon will be. When we say robots “cannot feel”, we are using our present level of development to judge the technology. In other words, we have no idea what the technology is capable of.

Moral and ethical questions will most likely give way when push comes to shove. Everything that humanity can do, it will do. And humans are good at “playing” the slippery slope. If we can make robots that do household chores or nurse the old and the sick, nothing will stop someone from exploiting the technology for military purposes.

We can’t be too optimistic or too pessimistic. The robots we create will only reflect their makers. If good prevails in the human race, then we should not worry too much about its offspring. The mean machines in the Terminator films nearly wiped out the human race when they became “self-aware”, and that scenario is not unthinkable, but the journey toward doomsday is led largely by us flesh-and-blood creations. 

At the end of the day, the evolution of robots and how much we should fear or embrace it is best summed up in one of greatest lines from “The Terminator”: “There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”