When your tech is smarter than you... by Katherine Roberts
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| scene from 'I, Robot' © 2004 Twentieth Century Fox. |
One of humanity's greatest fears is that intelligent machines will take over the world and enslave us as human beings. Science fiction has already been there, done that and got the robo-t-shirt. In the Terminator films, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cyborg assassin sent back through time to kill the one human who might be able to stop the machines. Whereas in I, Robot, based on a collection of short stories by Isaac Asimov, every robot is programmed with three basic laws designed to keep it subservient to humans:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or (through inaction) allow a human being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
We might not (yet) have rampaging Terminator-style machines tearing up our homes and firing on us in the streets, or a spookily-human robot in every home performing menial tasks and watching every move we make. But there are already military drones out there in the world capable of waging fiery war on targets that sometimes include humans, as well as humanoid robots capable of performing simple tasks... the line is very thin. And with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with the internet of things (IoT), it is about to become a whole lot thinner.
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| Amazon's EchoDot, incorporating Alexa. |
In place of Isaac Asimov's robots that (should) obey his three fictional laws, many households have already welcomed a smartspeaker into their home. It might look innocent enough sitting there in your kitchen quietly awaiting your next command, and its AI soul will probably be called something friendly, such as Amazon's Alexa, which will respond to your instructions with a soothing human voice. But it is a machine, and any intelligence it possesses is artificial... learnt from you in the manner of AI, and from millions like you. It certainly appears intelligent enough. It knows all sorts of stuff you don't, it can control other smart tech in your home, and it eavesdrops on you even when you are not actually talking to it - as was recently proved when evidence from a smartspeaker helped solve a domestic murder. In other words, if you are arrested for a crime, your smartspeaker can be called as a witness in your trial. Scary, huh?
You: "Alexa, play Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen"
Alexa: "Sorry, don't have time today. Got a murder trial to attend."
Soon you won't need to learn how to drive, because your electric car - connected to the Internet of Things - will do all the driving for you. It will take you where you want to go by following something similar to your current SatNav, and (hopefully) be intelligent enough not to crash into any other self-drive cars on the way... just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.
You might even own a small robot or two, although these (like your smartspeaker) probably don't look very humanoid. They can cut your lawn or vacuum your carpets, and apparently have enough 'intelligence' not to vacuum your cat, or cut your toes off while you're sunbathing in the garden with a cold beer watching them work - although both these scenarios could conceivably happen, should they malfunction... or, worse, learn from us how to rebel.
Humanoid robots do exist, though at the moment only for those households with a bigger budget. Meet Tesla's Optimus, a bargain at around $20,000 or so:
Even if you drive a pony and cart, and have banished all such smart devices from your home, most of you reading this blog will have a smartphone lurking in your pocket - or maybe in your hand, if you're blessed with good enough eyesight to be reading this post on its miniature screen. That little device you trust with your entire life admin and your innermost secrets is connected to a planet-wide network soon to be supplied by all those ugly 5G masts and small cells you see shooting up everywhere, and in the UK in just a couple of days' time (Sunday April 23rd 2023) it will shriek at you that there's a National Emergency and you should do exactly what it says... though DON'T PANIC, because this is just a test to see how you react. (Pony drivers might want to unharness their horsepower first.)
In future, such emergency alerts will apparently be used to warn us of environmental disasters such as floods, earthquakes, or large asteroids hitting the earth nearby. They will also warn of nuclear explosions in the vicinity (just in case you haven't noticed that scary mushroom cloud on the horizon because your nose is buried in your phone), or other life threatening events that might not be so visible, such as the next killer virus outbreak.
We can only hope that someone, somewhere, has built something like Asimov's three laws into all this smart stuff, because when our tech becomes smarter than us things really do start to get scary. How far do you trust Alexa? How faithfully would you follow commands from that small device, so much more than a phone, that you're holding in your hand? Could you really relax and let your self-drive car carry you and your loved ones to a strange destination? Tales of lorries and coaches full of tourists stuck in ploughed fields because the driver followed a faulty SatNav might be amusing - but how did that even happen? Surely qualified lorry drivers are more intelligent than a SatNav? Yet it seems some of us are already blindly following instructions issued by a machine, even when those instructions go against our common sense.
As far as I'm aware, Optimus the humanoid robot does not yet dream or question its existence like Sonny in I, Robot. We still have the option to ignore a misinformed SatNav and decide to drive our car ourselves, or ditch the autopilot and fly a faulty aircraft on manual. Those emergency alerts on your phone might well save your life, but if you want you still have the option to turn them off. Robots and AIs are no doubt useful to us as a human race, and will become even more useful as they grow more sophisticated and 'intelligent'.
Just never forget that someone, somewhere, had to program that robot and teach it how to behave... and that someone was a human being.
There is currently much discussion concerning how intelligent AI should be allowed to become. If you're interested in the ethics and possible dangers, here is some further reading:
https://www.thebookseller.com/rights/oneworld-signs-stantons-chatgpt-inspired-adult-debut
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Katherine Roberts writes fantasy and historical fiction for young readers.
She isn't too worried about AI replacing her as an author, because creativity and imagination are human attributes, and (so far) we have not created a robot that dreams.
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| Weird & Wonderful (short science fiction stories by Katherine Roberts) |
Comments
Along the way though, they will be increasingly useful. Given the declining birthrate and increased longevity, the long-lived of our generation are likely to find themselves being cared for entirely by helpful machines (so a friend I was chatting to yesterday thinks, and she's probably right). No substitute for the human touch of course but we may not have much choice. It's enough to convert one to euthanasia on the spot.
As for your update about the book being written in collaboration with ChatGPT, it's for adults, you say? What, this?
'Join Benny (a blue whale with a tiny penis) and his eclectic group of friends, including a sentient piece of sushi, a barmaid with a heart of gold, and a giant crab judge, as they journey through the Kingdom of Fantasy in Chaos in search of acceptance, love and purpose.'
If that's the way adult fiction is going, we are well into the land of AS, or Artificial Silliness, as AI seems to be blossoming into.
And yes, I think the ChatGPT collaboration is about a blue whale, so it sounds like the same book! (Damn, and I was just about to try asking AI to help me write my next children's bestseller...)