Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 24 September 2015

Editors, like publicans, apparently have some of the hardest jobs to automate. But the robots are probably coming for you

It’s hard to turn on the television nowadays without being shown a robot. It might be looking like a grasshopper doing something terribly important, such as helping a surgeon with an operation, or just be a cute little metal humanoid designed to make schoolchildren more interested in their studies. One robot I saw on TV the other day was disguised as a cuddly white seal pup that was feigning pleasure at being stroked on a woman’s lap in an old people’s home. It seemed to make her happy without biting or scratching or doing any of the other unpleasant things that live animals are prone to.

Robots clearly have their uses, then. But why is so much airtime now devoted to them? It seems to be the fault of Professor Stephen Hawking who, at the beginning of the year, sounded a fearsome alarm. ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,’ he said. This seemed rather a wild statement. Even if we made robots that turned out to be cleverer than ourselves, why should that necessarily mean our extinction? Couldn’t we achieve peaceful coexistence? Wouldn’t they be needing domestic servants?

Nevertheless, Hawking’s fears have been echoed by others. The Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer urges ‘prudence’ if we don’t want the machines we are building now to become ‘our new robot overlords’. ‘By the point when you sit down in front of your computer and your computer says, “Good morning, I’m in charge now,” it’s too late,’ he says.

Too late for what, exactly? It’s not clear to me. But what does seem clear already is that robots are going to put more and more of us out of work. In Milton Keynes, only a few miles from where I am writing this, there will soon be experimental driverless taxis ferrying people around town and negotiating its famous roundabouts.

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