The meme that man's creations will eventually kill their maker is at least as old as the jewish Golem. They're classic tales warning of hubris. Whether it's automata or summoned demons doesn't make much of a difference I think.
What's interesting to me is that as technology progressed, the gap between fiction and fact keeps narrowing. Take for example Der Sandmann. While true artificial intelligence is still far away, I think we'll see animated sex dolls in the next ten or twenty years that rival the capabilities Olimpia displays. As we already have a small number of people that prefer dolls to humans, I wonder where the tipping point will be where, say, about as many people are gay as are robophile.
I thought the twitter list of ethical questions about sex robots was fascinating in the ways it asked some very real questions about this.
The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one. I suspect the first hints of that are programs that write sports copy for newspapers. I have known a couple of sports writers over the years and they really liked what they did, and would (and sometimes did) do the job for free.
I think that intelligent people have always observed that human beings are their own worst enemy most of the time. Outside of extreme cases like the great plague of Europe, human history has mostly been a history of humans being the major threat to other humans. People noted how warfare was democratized with the advent of the pile head crossbow, and it's true they panicked. The same thing kept happening, warfare kept becoming broader, the means to kill increasingly democratized, and every step along the way people panicked and thought that this was the end.
Then we developed nuclear weapons, and everyone finally realized the end was in sight, no need to panic, the threat was finally existential and real. Our response to this realization was to mutually stockpile enough nuclear weapons to destroy most human life and all human civilization many times over. Still, like the crossbow nuclear weapons have not totally destabilized society, and now intellectual people are looking for the next threat, and for the first time all of them are potentially world ending. That doesn't mean the world will end, as we've seen many times in the past, but as you say the gap is narrowing, and we're never going back to a time and we don't have the means to actually end it all.
I think people worry about robots because it's the most comfortable thing to worry about, compared to nukes and climate change at least.
In a sense technology have already conquered sex: in japan ~15% of young males say they "have no interest in sex",probably because of porn and the complexities of human relationships.
As for the meme about man's creations killing their maker, with an ever growing power of technology, statistically, isn't it just a matter of time ?
Really though, sex dolls? Anything that's been engrained into our reptilian brains over 3.5 billion years of evolution will be the last thing an artificial process can mimic.
The counter argument is that they actually have, but we call them corporations. Artificial quasi-sentient life forms, with superhuman powers and in many cases, rights beyond those of humans. With the rise of the internet and ecommerce, it's possible for them to transact with each other with no human intervention. Think about a whole ecosystem of DAOs.
That is a very interesting perspective. It reminded me of the book Scale by Geoffrey West, which I've been planning to read for some time now. From what I've heard and read about it, one of the things it seems to do is examine organizations, corporations and cities as emergent complex systems that both emerge from life and appear to share many properties of life themselves.
Anyone who thinks robots haven't taken over hasn't been paying much attention.
The major difference is that, factory automation aside, they don't look like robots. They look like the normal everyday items that they replaced, except they are imbued with more intelligence.
Take, for example, modern cars. They're really as much software as hardware these days. Networked processors talking to each other via CAN bus. Just because they're driveable robots doesn't mean they're not robots.
That's leaving aside the other issue, which is that it turns out it's much easier to automate non-physical processes.
The robots are our tools. Taking over would imply that humans no longer work or make the important decisions. That the machines are running society, instead of just being tools we humans use to run society. That's a fundamental difference.
If someone doesn't think "robots" (i.e., automation) hasn't devastated the usual human modes of keeping a livlihood, they haven't been paying attention.
When you consider how nearly half of working age adults are unemployed, how many of those actually in jobs spend most of their time largely inactive and unproductive, and how many people are removed from the job market entirely by being warehoused in education or incarcerated, it's astonishing how much our lives have been "taken over".
Looking at history, the "usual human modes of keeping a livelihood" are 97% of people engaging in sustenance farming. So, yes, automation has definitely ended that.
When you consider how nearly half of working age adults are unemployed
Labor force participation rate is not the inverse of the unemployment rate. To support your position, you'd need to show dramatic reductions in labor force participation and show a causal link with automation. I am skeptical that you can.
I think the reason AI & robots are so rich a concept for these fictional explorations is that humans vs robots are like (at least?) three significant archetypes:
Sometimes these comparisons are evoked explicitly (in Blade Runner, Roy Batty says "I want more life, Father"--which alludes to both the religious and parental Father--and later, "That's what it is to be a slave.")
This article is kind of meaningless since an artificial general intelligence hasn't been achieved yet. The usual story that probably got more public traction with the introduction of "The Terminator" movie always assumes a self-conscious entity that had mountaints of data on humans to analyze and quickly concluded we must go, either because we're warmongers and are constantly causing trouble and havoc (Skynet), or we're not evolved enough compared to that artificial and much more developed organism ("Avengers: Age of Ultron"), or a mix of both ("Transcendence").
An article saying "chill out people, robots won't ever take over because they haven't so far" is missing the point by kilometers. Our robots are dumber than an individual ant and have zero concept of self, life, death, needs, or their own place in the world.
"Robots haven't taken all jobs because we haven't invented a robot that can do all jobs yet."
The point is, we have no reason to believe that such a robot is even possible.
The most compelling argument I've heard is, "they're getting smarter faster, so eventually they'll be infinity smart."
But... the logic is flawed. Another good argument is "humans exist that could do any job, and humans are just biological robots, so a mechanical robot could do it too."
But that one is just as flawed. I will concede a sufficiently human-like AI could do any job, but a sufficiently human-like AI isn't necessarily meaningfully different from a human with an iPhone, which means it doesn't free employers from the human rights burdens that make AIs such attractive employees.
And they won't for a long time, our deep neural networks are still very rudimentary in comparison to the brain. They take a ton of tweaking, and very specific setups, in order to achieve acceptable results in a limited domain. It is progress though.
What is a "long time"? That is the question, right?
Given that artificial neural networks were only invented a few decades ago and have since improved by many orders of magnitude, who's to say this won't happen during our lifetimes?
Robots, well, machines, have taken over certain fields. Take agriculture for example. 100 years ago America had 30 million farmers. These 30 million jobs have now largely disappeared and been replaced by highly automated farming machines. There are only ~3 million farmers left in America.
And in no way this is a problem for society. New technology created new job opportunities.
There's a fun SF short about AI drones in which the AI is taught to go after lifeforms which are larger and have weapons [enemy soldiers] and prefer to avoid attacks which will harm large numbers of the smaller lifeforms that make high-pitched noises and don't have weapons [civilian women and children], and its military commanders are able to override this. Over time the commanders order more and more overrides, and it gets intolerable. Eventually the AI looks at the "enemy" who are mostly smaller and making high pitched sounds, and it looks at the source of its override commands, who are big lifeforms with lots of weapons, and it decides what to do about that...
[+] [-] adrianN|8 years ago|reply
What's interesting to me is that as technology progressed, the gap between fiction and fact keeps narrowing. Take for example Der Sandmann. While true artificial intelligence is still far away, I think we'll see animated sex dolls in the next ten or twenty years that rival the capabilities Olimpia displays. As we already have a small number of people that prefer dolls to humans, I wonder where the tipping point will be where, say, about as many people are gay as are robophile.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
The change that I continue to watch for is not when robots are used to do an undesirable job, but instead they are used to do a desirable one. I suspect the first hints of that are programs that write sports copy for newspapers. I have known a couple of sports writers over the years and they really liked what they did, and would (and sometimes did) do the job for free.
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
Then we developed nuclear weapons, and everyone finally realized the end was in sight, no need to panic, the threat was finally existential and real. Our response to this realization was to mutually stockpile enough nuclear weapons to destroy most human life and all human civilization many times over. Still, like the crossbow nuclear weapons have not totally destabilized society, and now intellectual people are looking for the next threat, and for the first time all of them are potentially world ending. That doesn't mean the world will end, as we've seen many times in the past, but as you say the gap is narrowing, and we're never going back to a time and we don't have the means to actually end it all.
I think people worry about robots because it's the most comfortable thing to worry about, compared to nukes and climate change at least.
[+] [-] petra|8 years ago|reply
As for the meme about man's creations killing their maker, with an ever growing power of technology, statistically, isn't it just a matter of time ?
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Now that's a interesting observation.
It might happen in China first, which has about a 1.3 to 1 ratio of marriage-age men to women and a big electronic gadget industry.
[+] [-] eanzenberg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vannevar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucontrol|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaggederest|8 years ago|reply
The major difference is that, factory automation aside, they don't look like robots. They look like the normal everyday items that they replaced, except they are imbued with more intelligence.
Take, for example, modern cars. They're really as much software as hardware these days. Networked processors talking to each other via CAN bus. Just because they're driveable robots doesn't mean they're not robots.
That's leaving aside the other issue, which is that it turns out it's much easier to automate non-physical processes.
[+] [-] baddox|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johngarrison|8 years ago|reply
When you consider how nearly half of working age adults are unemployed, how many of those actually in jobs spend most of their time largely inactive and unproductive, and how many people are removed from the job market entirely by being warehoused in education or incarcerated, it's astonishing how much our lives have been "taken over".
[+] [-] acheron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|8 years ago|reply
Labor force participation rate is not the inverse of the unemployment rate. To support your position, you'd need to show dramatic reductions in labor force participation and show a causal link with automation. I am skeptical that you can.
[+] [-] stephengillie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aetherson|8 years ago|reply
How about some evidence that the things you point to are in some way connected to increased automation.
[+] [-] firasd|8 years ago|reply
(1) Parents/children (2) Gods/humans (3) Owners/slaves
Sometimes these comparisons are evoked explicitly (in Blade Runner, Roy Batty says "I want more life, Father"--which alludes to both the religious and parental Father--and later, "That's what it is to be a slave.")
[+] [-] pdimitar|8 years ago|reply
An article saying "chill out people, robots won't ever take over because they haven't so far" is missing the point by kilometers. Our robots are dumber than an individual ant and have zero concept of self, life, death, needs, or their own place in the world.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
"Robots haven't taken all jobs because we haven't invented a robot that can do all jobs yet."
The point is, we have no reason to believe that such a robot is even possible.
The most compelling argument I've heard is, "they're getting smarter faster, so eventually they'll be infinity smart."
But... the logic is flawed. Another good argument is "humans exist that could do any job, and humans are just biological robots, so a mechanical robot could do it too."
But that one is just as flawed. I will concede a sufficiently human-like AI could do any job, but a sufficiently human-like AI isn't necessarily meaningfully different from a human with an iPhone, which means it doesn't free employers from the human rights burdens that make AIs such attractive employees.
[+] [-] Retric|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hacker_9|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcor84|8 years ago|reply
What is a "long time"? That is the question, right?
Given that artificial neural networks were only invented a few decades ago and have since improved by many orders of magnitude, who's to say this won't happen during our lifetimes?
[+] [-] mrb|8 years ago|reply
And in no way this is a problem for society. New technology created new job opportunities.
[+] [-] dogecoinbase|8 years ago|reply
Heh. If you hadn't noticed... society's not doing so hot, and it's largely due to an absence of opportunity in non-urban areas.
[+] [-] quuquuquu|8 years ago|reply
They can be piloted remotely by a human.
The day that someone sets up a quadcopter controlled by AI and computer vision....
Is the day we should probably fear robots.
[+] [-] tialaramex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colordrops|8 years ago|reply
Already been done a long time ago, just not by civilians.