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Asked by annacupcake101 to Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 6 Mar 2017.
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Iulia Motoc answered on 6 Mar 2017:
I don’t think the robots will take over the world. We are still very far of understanding how humans work so we cannot make a robot that thinks on it own. If they can’t think on their own, they cannot control us.
On top of that, I think the robots will always be manipulated by us to some extend. We are the ones that create them and program them to give them life. We are the ones that make them think. If they do become self aware, we will make sure to teach them the three laws of robotics (Asimov’s laws). The same way we keep order between humans in the present day.
I do however think that robots will become a very important part of our lives. The same way computers became a very important part of our lives. But I don’t think they will take over the world or even replace people.
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anon answered on 6 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.
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Katie Pavey answered on 6 Mar 2017:
That’s a great question annacupcake 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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Siobhan Duncan answered on 7 Mar 2017:
Dear annacupcake101,
The short answer is no.
People in Hollywood who write stories about robots outsmarting humans and turning us into slaves, give engineers like me a lot more credit that we deserve.
Building robots that are as clever as the least clever animal, is really difficult and we are nowhere near this yet, never mind robots that can outsmart humans!
However if you want to build robots that are smarter than humans, there is no reason why you couldn’t give it a go!Siobhan
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