• Question: Do you think that in the next 10 years robots will take over the world since the world has been producing too much technology such as electronic cars or robots.

    Asked by anon-74270 on 1 May 2020.
    • Photo: Amber Villegas - Williamson

      Amber Villegas - Williamson answered on 1 May 2020:

      Hiya, I personally don’t think that robots will “take over the world” as we’ve seen in some movies (we’re a long long way off anything like that ever happening, and even then it’s unlikely).

      What is more likely is that drones and robots will be used in combat situations and run the risk of being hacked. They’ll possibly be automated and similarly to car self-drive technology they may be programmed with Kill Parameters. I really hope this doesn’t happen and there is a Campaign https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/ which has Robot Wars judge Noel Sharkey as a member who are trying to get the laws written now so that any future “kill orders” need to have a human pulling the trigger (similar to how they do drone air strikes at the moment). Otherwise accountability can be questioned.

      People don’t realise that ethics and law have a huge part to play in engineering.

    • Photo: Katie Sparks

      Katie Sparks answered on 13 May 2020:

      We do have a lot of robots, but I don’t think they’ll take over the world.
      Lots of robots have been created that do a very specific thing: so following a particular process and doing something, then we can create a robot for it. The advantage of this is that it frees up a person to do more interesting work.
      Of course, we can also use robots that are mostly controlled by people, to do things that it isn’t safe or is very difficult to do with a person.

Comments

  • tomstewartbrackenridge commented on :

    Good question, I do think the advancement in technology and artificial intelligence (AI) that has come about in the past 10 years has been extraordinary. No will know for sure where we will be in another 10 years time. I can see more and more AI and robots doing repetitive tasks, and tasks that would take a human a lot longer to do in a short space of time. A good example is the Jaguar Land Rover production line, most of the production line is conveyor belts and robots all communicating with one another to reduce the work a human would do, at a fraction of the cost. This is a big step in the manufacturing industry as it takes away the human aspect of the job and reduces the overheads massively.

  • Photo: Leah

    Leah commented on :

    Quite simply: no I don’t. Not in 10 years, anyway. Most robots are limited in their decision making to the options that we manually program into them, and blindly carry out commands one by one. These are the sort of robots that I work with. Their actions are not just repeatable – it is unimaginable for them to ‘decide’ to do anything that they had not been programmed to do!

    However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field which allows machines to make decisions more like humans do, and some people are worried that eventually it could lead to a scenario that you described. I do not work in AI (and am definitely not an expert), but my boyfriend does – he uses it to make prosthetic limbs works better. So is definitely has its uses. I think it is important that we think about possibilities of AI getting out of hand, and that experts keep track of this. But don’t let it worry you!