The Ultimate Case: Humans v. Robots

Forgive me for being absent for the past two weeks again, I was away on holiday somewhere without wifi. I know, that’s shocking, and no, I wasn’t in the Arctic Circle. But when I did get back on the grid, I ended up reading quite a weird article involving humans and robots being able to marry each other.

I think that there is a disconnection somewhere in the scheme of things. Robots and humans will never be equal. There. I got my thesis out. Now let me tell you why that is so. And it doesn’t even have to do with jobs and the creative spirit of humans.

Artificial intelligence, to begin with, is basically a series of extremely complicated commands and instructions to create a machine that will do a, b, and c, whether they be a) unlock the computer, b) turn on the app, c) find my account’s details, or a) clean the house, b) walk the dog, and c) make cookies for me. As we progress, the things that AI software can do combined with robotic hardware will be almost endless. But ethically and morally, there are some things that should just be declared off limits. For example, elevating robots enough so that they can marry humans.

You see, you might be able to write the AI code well enough that there seems to be a relationship between the person and the robot, but it’s just a set of commands that robot follows according to the surrounding environment: if he/she gave me a hug, then give a hug back. If he/she did not come to see me today, then break up with them. That’s the thing about artificial intelligence. It’s artificial. It will never be able to replace genuine human articles.

Marriage aside, there are more ways that it will be terrible for us humans if we make robots our equal. And I’m not talking about Skynet or robots taking over the world, but about citizenship rights, because citizenship is quite important. If robots are the equals of humans, will they be allowed to vote and hold political office? Imagine the United Nations in fifty years, where half the prime ministers and presidents are robots. You see, the problem is that robots are programmable, which means that if the above situation is true, whoever manufactures the robots will wield all the power, because once robots are given the rights of citizenship, they can easily outnumber the humans and vote whichever way that their creator chooses them to vote.

This is something that would be one day not and the next day so, rather, it will grow on us like a mould, and one day sometime in the future, the world might end up this way: ruined by the choices of people today. Now I’m not saying to go out there and begin fighting tooth and nail against artificial intelligence. I would advise caution, and to always remember that civilisation is always one generation away from disaster. Let us not be that generation.