Robotics is getting awfully close to producing a true sci-fi style robot. Now a company has announced a brand new approach to robotics: a synthetic human. Artifical organs, a vascular system and a nervous system. This is called the Clone Alpha. (I think someone needs to read more science fiction.)
The Japanese have been working on robotics for some time and have gotten pretty good at them. You can even buy one (unlike the Clone Alpha, which isn’t actually available yet, though they are taking advance orders).
But it really raises the question: why?
The closer it / they get to Human the more one has to ask: why? Eight billion “real” people on the planet, do we need artificial ones?
Answer: it’s a legal alternative to slavery.
Answer: it’s a kind of narcissism.
Answer: it will do what ever you tell it, unlike “real” people (except wives who’ve been beaten [literally or emotionally] into complete subservience by the husband or by a really savage culture).
Problem: real slavery is cheaper.(1)
The stated economic reasons for developing robots is to relieve Humans of the dangerous and undesirable jobs. The problem with this is that People need to feel useful and in our culture that generally means having a job. 8+ billion people, it’s questionable whether there really are enough jobs for everyone as it is.
In fact, there are not enough jobs, as evidenced by the exponential growth of scams, phone scams, email scams, fake tech support, and all the rest. If that’s what making a living comes down to, then the entire world has severe economic issues already. What happens when several million robots start replacing those menial jobs?
In fact (again), this is already happening. Those massive phone banks that used to call us to offer warranties on our car’s student loans (and other such impossible ridiculousness) are already being replaced with AI “bots” who can handle a fairly sophisticated conversation (except maybe with an educated person).
So, whether those are good and useful jobs or not (and they’re not) they are being lost. How many folks are involved in the “scam industry?” Hard to say. But it’s a freakin’ lot of money (which is why it isn’t prosecuted any more than it has been — too much money involved to risk shutting it down).
There’s an automated fast food kitchen in development. Replaces all those jobs high school kids used to be able to get during the summer, or even all the adults who can’t or don’t know how to get a better job will lose even that opportunity for work.
Robots don’t have to look like people to be a threat to the global economy and to the individual’s ability to survive and raise a family… who will then need work in their own time.
All the same, here come the Humanoid Robots.
And no “three laws” will be built in(2).
It’s marvelous technology, but honestly I can’t think of any good reason for Humanoid Robots to exist just now.
Too many Blade Runner and such tales bouncing around in my head, maybe.
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(1) If you’re one of those people who thinks slavery is gone from the world, then honestly, you need to wake up. The traffic in “white slaves” is huge now and growing all the time. Slavery has many casues, many goals and desires. None of them are “human” in any real sense, though. Nasty, nasty. Slavers make Hannibal Lecter seem a decent person.
(2) The three laws of robotics were invented by sci-fi genius Isaac Asimov in his robot stories (of which there were many). They have been used in many another tale, on TV and in movies, without ever citing Dr Asimov’s name. Really a shame, that. But frankly, it’s an impossible technology, at least as Dr Asimov imagined it. And given the nature of modern software, full of Bugs and Design Flaws, do you really want to trust a Robot to always do the right thing? The movie series RoboCop (the original, not the remake, good though it was) made an excellent point about the difference between a software-driven robot and a Human.
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