• Question: Do you fear the world being over run with robots that then make humans inferior & pointless so we sit at home eating ourself into death?

    Asked by ReneeTheBestest to Jamie, Kristen, Sheun, Simon, Will on 14 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Sheun Oshinbolu

      Sheun Oshinbolu answered on 14 Jun 2015:

      Well, I haven’t thought about it that much but I don’t think society will come to that. Robots are only as good as the person that makes/programs them, so they may never be perfect. Also they lack emotions (from the movies that I’ve seen 😀 ) which does not make them ideal to work or control humans.

      A zombie apocalypse on the other hand……

    • Photo: William Scott-Jackson

      William Scott-Jackson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      If robots ever got to the stage where they could design improvements to themselves and implement them without human intervention then I’d be worried. In theory robots could out evolve us and make us completely obsolete.

      As Sheun has said though, the robots are only as clever as the human programming their firmware. Computers and robots are still rather stupid relatively speaking and take far longer to complete tasks that humans find trivial.

    • Photo: Jamie Johnston

      Jamie Johnston answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      This sounds like the start of a good Sci-fi novel! I don’t think it will ever come to that, there is lots to life other than basic tasks, even if much of life were automated, there would still be a need for the arts like music etc.

    • Photo: Simon Marchant

      Simon Marchant answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      No. I quite like eating. 😀

      … However, more seriously, like these guys say, it’s a bit difficult to program robots to do certain things. This is probably because brains and computer chips work in totally different ways. In fact, although they both use electricity and networks (yup, your brain runs off electricity. Awesome, I know), even when we do things that are the same (like, say, add 2+2 and then write down the answer), absolutely everything that happens is totally different. So, just like all these wise folks say, robots will probably never totally replace people because we’re good at different things!

      Also, I think that it would be great to have robots do lots of things. It could be difficult to get it right (like you say, we don’t want everyone doing nothing!) but robots are great at boring jobs, so imagine if all of us could spend all of our time doing only what we loved because robots did everything else!

      Just nobody make Skynet. I don’t want to live in the Terminator films.

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