Robots and us
Three specialists, each eminent in a different field, respond to questions about how humans and robots relate.
The opening question, 'Should we send robots to settle other planets?', went first to Professor Anselm Reuter, whose field is cosmology and astrophysics. By the close of this century, he predicted, robotic craft will have charted the whole solar system. 'After that, asteroids could be mined, so that sizeable structures might be built in space rather than every raw material being hauled up from Earth. To my mind that is a soberer, kinder prospect than terraforming a world.' Any planet people did settle, he added, ought to be safeguarded under an arrangement much like the one protecting Antarctica here on Earth.
Professor Dita Varga, an engineer who designs robots, took a more sceptical line on occupying other worlds and mining minerals from them. 'Unless the resources can actually be shipped home, I see no urgent reason to move onto another planet. Even here, most of Earth lies out of our reach. Sending our machines to gather what we need closer to home strikes me as a wiser way to use them.'
To Professor Solveig Amundsen, a social anthropologist, the very word 'colonisation' carried an uneasy moral charge. 'Whatever we set out to do, on Earth or on Mars alike, should spring from real curiosity about the Other, an effort to encounter it, rather than a wish to stamp our own template upon it.'
The second question asked how long before machine intelligence would overtake our own. Reuter noted that machines can now defeat people at chess, yet quickly qualified the point. 'What a robot still handles poorly is reading its physical surroundings; picking up and shifting real chess pieces defeats it in a way that would not trouble a small child. The machines that come after, though, may before the century is out deal with the world around them, and with us, every bit as deftly as we do. That is when the ethical puzzles surface. Would anything be wrong in putting such robots to use? Should it bother us if they end up idle, bored or frustrated?'
Varga, taking the same question, argued that in a narrow sense the threshold had already been crossed. 'At finding their way about, holding information and tracking down particular items, machines leave us far behind. What not one of them can yet do is match the reliable, flexible grip a person has on what they see or hear. A machine coming anywhere close to human creativity inside the next fifty years would be a very tall order indeed.'
Amundsen steered the discussion elsewhere, suggesting that our unease about machines growing too clever reveals more about us than about them. The habit, as she saw it, grows out of our readiness to treat lifeless things as though alive: we shape machines in our own likeness, assume they reason and act as we do, and so view them as dangers with wills of their own. 'The instant we lay the trouble at the machines' door, we start imagining them as mightier than they truly are, and in time that is precisely what they become.'
Turning to the third question, whether progress in artificial intelligence ought to frighten us, Reuter suggested that the people who really should feel nervous are the forecasters pinning their hopes on the so-called singularity. 'A further danger is that, as our dependence on linked computer systems keeps deepening, those networks begin behaving like one vast mind of their own, chasing ends that do us no good. The safeguard, to my mind, is to hold robots down to the level of mere idiot savants: dazzling at calculation and at handling data, by all means, yet never sharp enough to outmanoeuvre us.'
Varga observed that artificial intelligence has done damage already, the computer virus being the plainest example. 'Even so, the real intelligence there sits with whoever wrote the virus out of malice. What matters is that computers do us vastly more good than their viruses ever do us harm. Robotics, too, will be abused here and there before long, but its gains ought in the same way to outweigh whatever losses accompany it.'
Amundsen answered by turning the fear itself into the thing worth examining. 'What we should ask is why the dread of robots and artificial intelligence lingers, when not one of them has actually risen against us to contest our dominance.' Since machines have never yet proved dangerous, she reasoned, there is scant ground for assuming they suddenly will. Besides, she pointed out, a good many people feel no dread at all, welcoming intelligent machines rather than fearing them.
On the closing question, about what science fiction might teach us regarding robots, Reuter offered a wry piece of counsel. 'Now and then I tell my students that good science fiction rewards reading more than mediocre science does: livelier, and probably in the end no likelier to prove mistaken.'
Varga, by contrast, dwelt on how shrewdly the genre has anticipated what was coming. 'Science fiction has often been uncannily good at foreseeing the future, sketching a whole span of imagined worlds, from endearing, helpful machines to bleak societies under robot rule. What strikes me is that scarcely any of it pictures a future without robots.'
Amundsen brought things to a close by noting that people nowadays routinely cut the world in two, reality on one side and fiction and fantasy on the other. That boundary, she explained, was not always present; it was traced by scientists and technologists anxious to fence off a domain of their own. 'The line is far blurrier than it appears, which is exactly why the two realms now and then collide. On occasion we have to draw these separate ways of understanding back together if the full picture is what we are after. Manage that, and perhaps we will no longer be so terrified that a thing fashioned in our own image will turn against us.'
* terraforming: modifying a planet's atmosphere to suit human needs ** singularity: the point at which robots become able to create ever more sophisticated versions of themselves
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Question 1 - 7
Match each statement with the correct expert, A, B or C.
A
B
C
1.
Keeping people safe may mean deliberately limiting what robots are permitted to do.
2.
People tend to overstate how much danger robots really present.
3.
Matching the inventiveness of the human mind is something machines are unlikely to manage for a very long time.
4.
The day may come when the fair or unfair handling of robots becomes a question we cannot dodge.
5.
Machines are probably more useful to us on our own world than out in space.
6.
The predictions in the best science fiction may turn out no more mistaken than the claims of second-rate science.
7.
Smarter machines are something a fair number of people actively hope to see.
List of options
A
Solveig Amundsen
B
Anselm Reuter
C
Dita Varga