The descent of man

Why do humans want to build robots? It seems, on the face of it, to be a suicidal endeavour, destroying jobs and, ultimately, rendering our species redundant as more intelligent and effective beings take over. Lacking, as we now do, an agreed metaphysical justification for human specialness — for example, the soul — it must only be a matter of time before we submit to the machine ascendancy.

So far, it has been a subtle, incremental process that conceals any wider significance. Take satellite navigation. This was first introduced in the 1980s and is now more or less universal. Maps have become quaint. As a result, we walk or drive without a visual model of where we are. This may be a small loss of human agency but it’s a loss nonetheless.

Driverless cars may turn out to be a less subtle, more spectacular example. The UK has permitted road testing, as have many American states. All the big car-makers and some big tech companies have plans to get us away from the steering wheel within the next few years. The arguments in favour are potent — greater safety, less congestion, freedom for the young, the elderly and the disabled. The arguments against are threadbare in comparison — loss of pleasure and control and a certain queasy sense that something is wrong here.

Queasy, however, becomes something more substantial when we are confronted by robots designed to look like humans. Here we are confounded by the uncanny. The human appearance evokes emotional responses — concern, anger, empathy, lust, love — that are simultaneously negated by the knowledge that this is a machine. This is terrifying. We can assess most things that look like humans because they are, but how do we assess this? What might it do?