The debate
over “if robots would overtake humans” has recently been heated up by warnings
against the potential threat of unregulated development of robots from some
academic or industrial super stars. However, what is obviously missing in those
warnings is a clear description of any realistic scenario by which robots could
assuredly challenge humans as a whole, not as puppets programmed and controlled
by humans, but as autonomous powers acting on their own "will". If
this type of scenarios would never be realistic then even though we might
possibly see robots be used as ruthless killing machines in near future by
terrorists, dictators and warlords as warned by the elite scientists and
experts[1], we might still not worry too much about the so called demonic
threat of robots as warned by some elite experts since it is just another form
of human threat in the end. However, if the type of scenarios mentioned above
could foreseeably be realized in the real world, then humans do need to start
worrying about how to prevent the peril from happening instead of how to win
debates over imaginary dangers.
The reason
that people on both sides of the debate could not see or show a very clear
scenario that robots could indeed challenge humans in a very realistic way is
truly a philosophical issue. So far all discussions on the issue have focused on the possibility of creating a robot
that could be considered as a human in the sense that it could indeed think as
a human instead of being solely a tool of humans operated with programmed
instructions. According to this line of thought it seems that we do not need to
worry about the threat of robots to our human species as a whole since nobody
could yet provide any plausible reason that it is possible to produce this type
of robots.
Unfortunately
this way of thinking is philosophically incorrect because people who are
thinking in this way are missing a fundamental point about our own human
nature: human beings are social creatures.
An
important reason that we could survive as what we are now and could do what we
are doing now is because we are living and acting as a societal community.
Similarly, when we estimate the potential of robots we should not solely focus
our attention on their individual intelligence (which of course is so far
infused by humans), but should also take into consideration of their
sociability (which of course would be initially created by humans).
This would
further lead to another philosophical question: what would fundamentally
determine the sociability of robots? There might be a wide range of arguments
on this question. But in term of being able to challenge humans I would argue
that the fundamental sociable criteria for robots could be defined as follows:
1) Robots
could communicate with each other;
2) Robots
could help each other to recover from damage or shutdown through necessary
operations including changes of batteries or replenishment of other forms of
energy supply;
3) Robots
could carry out the manufacture of other robots from exploring, collecting,
transporting and processing raw materials to assembling the final robots.
Once
robots could possess the above functionalities and start to “live” together as
a mutually dependent multitude, we should reasonably view them as sociable
beings. Sociable robots could form community of robots. Once robots could
function as defined above and form a community they would no longer need to
live as slaves of their human masters. Once that happens it would be the
beginning of a history that robots could possibly challenge humans or start
their cause of taking over humans.
The next
question would be: Is the sociability defined above realistic for robots?
Since not
all the functionalities mentioned above exist (at least publically) in this
world today, to avoid any unnecessary argument, it would be wise to make our
judgment based upon whether any known scientific principle would be violated in
any practical attempt to realize any particular functionality among those
mentioned above. Communication with other machines, moving objects, system
operation and repairment of machines, and exploring natural resources are all
among nowadays common practices with programmed machineries. Therefore, even
though we might not have a single robot or a group of single robots possess all
the functionalities mentioned above, there is no fundamental reason for any of
the functionalities mentioned above to be considered as not producible
according to any known scientific principle, the only thing left to do would be
to integrate those functionalities together onto a single whole robot (and thus
a group of single robots).
Since we
don’t see any known scientific principle that would prevent any of those
functionalities from being realized, we should reasonably expect that with
money to be invested and with time to be spent the creation of sociable robots
as defined earlier could foreseeably become real unless some special efforts to
be made by humans on this world to prevent that from happening.
Although
sociability would be a critical precondition for robots to challenge humans, it
might still not be sufficient for robots to pose any threat to humans yet. In
order for robots to become real threat to humans, they need to possess some
ability to fight or combat. Unfortunate for humans, fighting ability of robots
might be more real than their sociability. It is reasonable to expect that
human manufacturers of robots would make great efforts to integrate as much the
most advanced technology available as possible into the design and production
of robots. Therefore, based upon some common knowledge about nowadays
technology and what we have already witnessed about what robots could do, we
might very moderately expect that an army of robots would be capable of doing
the following:
1) They
would be highly coordinated. Even if scatter around the world, thousands of
robots could be coordinated though telecommunication;
2) They
would be good at remotely controlling their weaponry or even the weaponry of
their enemies once they break into the enemy’s defense system;
3) They
could “see” and “hear” what happens hundreds or even thousands miles away, no
matter it happens in open space or in concealed space, no matter the sound is
propagating through air or though wire;
4) Even as
individuals, they might be able to move on land, on or under water, as well as
in air, in all weather conditions, and move slow or fast as needed;
5) They
could react promptly to stimulations, act and attack with high precision, and
see through walls or ground earth;
6) Of
course, they could identify friends and enemies, and also make decision of
action based upon the targets or the situations they are facing;
7)
Besides, they are not bothered by some fundamental human natures such as
material and sexual desires, jealousy, need of rest, or scare of death. They
are poison proof (no matter for chemical or bio poisons), and they might even
be bullet proof.
According
to the definition of sociability of robots given above, robots in a community
would be able to 1) help each other to recover from damage or shutdown, and
thus it would not be an issue for robots to replace their existing operating
system or application programs if needed, and the same would be true for the
replacement or addition of required new hardware parts; 2) manufacture new
parts for producing new robots, and thus as long as there are designs for new
software or hardware, they could produce the final products based upon the
design.
The above
two points are what robots could be practically made to do even today. However,
in order for robots to win a full scale war against humans, they need to be
able to perform complicated logical reasoning when facing various unfamiliar
situations. This might be a more difficult goal than any capability or
functionality so far mentioned in this writing. There could be two different
ways to achieve this goal.
We might
call the first way as Nurturing way, by which humans continue to improve the
logical reasoning ability of robots through AI programming development even
after the robots have formed a community. Humans keep nurturing the community
of robots in this way until at one point they are good enough to win the full
scale war against humans and then set them off to fight against humans. To
people without technical background, this might sound like a wishful thinking
without assured certainty; but to people with some basic programming background
would be able to see as long as time and money are invested in creating a
society of robots that could challenge humans, this is hundred percent doable.
The second
way would be an Evolution way, by which from the very beginning humans create a
community of robots that could make their own evolution through software and
hardware upgrading. The main challenge for robots to be able to evolve would be
how they could evolve through design for upgrading their own software and
hardware. The task to make robots able to evolve by themselves could then be
reduced to two simpler tasks: 1) to enable robots to identify needs, 2) to
enable robots to make software and hardware designs based upon needs. The first
goal of identifying needs could be achieved by recording the history of failure
to accomplish a previous mission, which could in turn be achieved by examining
(through some fuzzy logic type programming) how a previous mission was
accomplished. The second goal of designing based upon needs might be a bit more
complicated in principle, but still possible to be fulfilled. This second
approach (i.e. the Evolution way) would be a bigger challenge than the Nurturing
way mentioned above and we cannot see a hundred percent certainty for this to
happen in the future even if money and time is invested. However, even if
humans failed to create evolutionary community of robots, they still could help
robots to be intelligent enough to fight a full scale war against humans
through the Nurturing way mentioned above.
There is
still one critical question left for this writing to answer which is why any
reasonable humans would create socially independent community of robots with
lethal power and help them to fight against humans instead of making them tools
or slaves of humans?
We need to
look at this question from two different levels.
First,
whether someone who is able to mobilize and organize resource to create a community
of sociable robots would indeed has the intention to do so is a social issue,
which does not possesses the type of hard restriction as provided by natural
laws. In other words, as long as something is possible to happen according to
natural laws, we could not exclude the possibility solely based upon our own
wishful thinking about the intentions of all humans.
Second,
human civilization contains some suicidal gene in itself. The competition of
human society would provide enough motives for people who are able to do
something to enhance their own competing power to push their creativity and
productivity to the maximal edge. Furthermore, history has proved that humans
are vulnerable to ignorance of many potential risks when they are going for
extremes for their own benefits. Especially, once some groups of humans are
capable of doing something with potentially dangerous risks, a very few
decision makers or even one single person could make the difference of whether
they would actually do it or not. Since there is no natural law to prevent
community of sociable robots with lethal power from being created, without
social efforts of regulations, we might come to a point when we need to count
on the psychological stability of very few or even a single person to determine
whether humans would be threatened by robots.
The last
question that remains might be why humans would possibly make robots to hate
humans even if we would create communities of sociable robots? The answer could
also be as simple as what is mentioned above: for the sake of competition......
[1] Autonomous
Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers, July 28, 2015, url:
http://futureoflife.org/AI/open_letter_autonomous_weapons
The
debate over “if robots would overtake humans” has recently been heated up by
warnings against the potential threat of unregulated development of robots from
some academic or industrial super stars. However, what is obviously missing in
those warnings is a clear description of any realistic scenario by which robots
could assuredly challenge humans as a whole, not as puppets programmed and
controlled by humans, but as autonomous powers acting on their own
"will". If this type of scenarios would never be realistic then even
though we might possibly see robots be used as ruthless killing machines in
near future by terrorists, dictators and warlords as warned by the elite
scientists and experts[1], we
might still not worry too much about the so called demonic threat of robots as
warned by some elite experts since it is just another form of human threat in
the end. However, if the type of scenarios mentioned above could foreseeably be
realized in the real world, then humans do need to start worrying about how to
prevent the peril from happening instead of how to win debates over imaginary
dangers.
The
reason that people on both sides of the debate could not see or show a very
clear scenario that robots could indeed challenge humans in a very realistic
way is truly a philosophical issue. So far all discussions on the issue have
focused on the possibility of creating a robot that could be considered as a
human in the sense that it could indeed think as a human instead of being
solely a tool of humans operated with programmed instructions. According to
this line of thought it seems that we do not need to worry about the threat of
robots to our human species as a whole since nobody could yet provide any
plausible reason that it is possible to produce this type of robots.
Unfortunately
this way of thinking is philosophically incorrect because people who are
thinking in this way are missing a fundamental point about our own human
nature: human beings are social creatures.
An
important reason that we could survive as what we are now and could do what we
are doing now is because we are living and acting as a societal community.
Similarly, when we estimate the potential of robots we should not solely focus
our attention on their individual intelligence (which of course is so far
infused by humans), but should also take into consideration their sociability (which
of course would be initially created by humans).
This
would further lead to another philosophical question: what would fundamentally
determine the sociability of robots? There might be a wide range of arguments
on this question. But in term of being able to challenge humans I would argue
that the fundamental sociable criteria for robots could be defined as follows:
1)
Robots could communicate with each other;
2)
Robots could help each other to recover from damage or shutdown through
necessary operations including changes of batteries or replenishment of other
forms of energy supply;
3)
Robots could carry out the manufacture of other robots from exploring,
collecting, transporting and processing raw materials to assembling the final
robots.
Once robots
could possess the above functionalities and start to “live” together as a
mutually dependent multitude, we should reasonably view them as sociable
beings. Sociable robots could form community of robots. Once robots could
function as defined above and form a community they would no longer need to
live as slaves of their human masters. Once that happens it would be the
beginning of a history that robots could possibly challenge humans or start
their cause of taking over humans.
The
next question would be: Is the sociability defined above realistic for robots?
Since
not all the functionalities mentioned above exist (at least publically) in this
world today, to avoid any unnecessary argument, it would be wise to make our
judgment based upon whether any known scientific principle would be violated in
any practical attempt to realize any particular functionality among those
mentioned above. Communication with other machines, moving objects, operating
and repairing machine systems, and exploring natural resources are all
among nowadays common practices with programmed machineries. Therefore, even
though we might not have a single robot or a group of single robots possess all
the functionalities mentioned above, there is no fundamental reason for any of
the functionalities mentioned above to be considered as not producible
according to any known scientific principle, the only thing left to do would be
to integrate those functionalities together onto a single whole robot (and thus
a group of single robots).
Since
we don’t see any known scientific principle that would prevent any of those
functionalities from being realized, we should reasonably expect that with
money to be invested and with time to be spent the creation of sociable robots
as defined earlier could foreseeably become real unless some special efforts to
be made by humans on this world to prevent that from happening.
Although
sociability would be a critical precondition for robots to challenge humans, it
might still not be sufficient for robots to pose any threat to humans yet. In
order for robots to become real threat to humans, they need to possess some
ability to fight or combat. Unfortunate for humans, fighting ability of robots
might be more real than their sociability. It is reasonable to expect that
human manufacturers of robots would make great efforts to integrate as much the
most advanced technology available as possible into the design and production
of robots. Therefore, based upon some common knowledge about nowadays
technology and what we have already witnessed about what robots could do, we
might very moderately expect that an army of robots would be capable of doing
the following:
1) They
would be highly coordinated. Even if scatter around the world, thousands of
robots could be coordinated though telecommunication;
2) They
would be good at remotely controlling their weaponry or even the weaponry of
their enemies once they break into the enemy’s defense system;
3) They
could “see” and “hear” what happens hundreds or even thousands miles away, no
matter it happens in open space or in concealed space, no matter the sound is
propagating through air or though wire;
4) Even
as individuals, they might be able to move on land, on or under water, as well
as in air, in all weather conditions, and move slow or fast as needed;
5) They
could react promptly to stimulation, act and attack with high precision,
and see through walls or ground earth;
6) Of
course, they could identify friends and enemies, and also make decision of
action based upon the targets or the situations they are facing;
7)
Besides, they are not bothered by some fundamental human natures such as
material and sexual desires, jealousy, need of rest, or scare of death. They
are poison proof (no matter for chemical or bio poisons), and they might even
be bullet proof.
According
to the definition of sociability of robots given above, robots in a community
would be able to 1) help each other to recover from damage or shutdown, and
thus it would not be an issue for robots to replace their existing operating
system or application programs if needed, and the same would be true for the
replacement or addition of required new hardware parts; 2) manufacture new
parts for producing new robots, and thus as long as there are designs for new
software or hardware, they could produce the final products based upon the
design.
The
above two points are what robots could be practically made to do even today.
However, in order for robots to win a full scale war against humans, they need
to be able to perform complicated logical reasoning when facing various
unfamiliar situations. This might be a more difficult goal than any capability
or functionality so far mentioned in this writing. There could be two different
ways to achieve this goal.
We
might call the first way as Nurturing way, by which humans continue to improve
the logical reasoning ability of robots through AI programming development even
after the robots have formed a community. Humans keep nurturing the community
of robots in this way until at one point they are good enough to win the full
scale war against humans and then set them off to fight against humans. To
people without technical background, this might sound like a wishful thinking
without assured certainty; but people with some basic programming background
would be able to see as long as time and money are invested in creating a
society of robots that could challenge humans, this is hundred percent
doable.
The
second way would be an Evolution way, by which from the very beginning humans
create a community of robots that could make their own evolution through
software and hardware upgrading. The main challenge for robots to be able to
evolve would be how they could evolve through design for upgrading their own
software and hardware. The task to make robots able to evolve by themselves
could then be reduced to two simpler tasks: 1) to enable robots to identify
needs, 2) to enable robots to make software and hardware designs based upon
needs. The first goal of identifying needs could be achieved by recording the
history of failure to accomplish a previous mission, which could in turn be
achieved by examining (through some fuzzy logic type programming) how a
previous mission was accomplished. The second goal of designing based upon
needs might be a bit more complicated in principle, but still possible to be
fulfilled. This second approach (i.e. the Evolution way) would be a bigger challenge
than the Nurturing way mentioned above and so far we still cannot see a hundred
percent certainty for this to happen in the future even if money and time is
invested. However, even if humans failed to create evolutionary community of
robots, they still could help robots to be intelligent enough to fight a full
scale war against humans through the Nurturing way mentioned above.
There
is still one critical question left for this writing to answer which is why any
reasonable humans would create socially independent community of robots with
lethal power and help them to fight against humans instead of making them tools
or slaves of humans?
We need
to look at this question from two different levels.
First,
whether someone who is able to mobilize and organize resource to create a
community of sociable robots would indeed has the intention to do so is a
social issue, which is not under any hard restriction as provided by natural
laws. As long as something is possible to happen according to natural laws, we
could not exclude the possibility solely based upon our own wishful thinking
about the intentions of all humans.
Second,
human civilization contains some suicidal gene in itself. The competition of
human society would provide enough motives for people who are able to do
something to enhance their own competing power to push their creativity and
productivity to the maximal edge. Furthermore, history has proven that humans
are vulnerable to ignorance of many potential risks when they are going for extremes
for their own benefits. Especially, once some groups of humans are capable of
doing something with potentially dangerous risks for others and themselves, a
very few decision makers or even one single person could make the difference of
whether they would actually do it or not. Since there is no natural law to
prevent community of sociable robots with lethal power from being created,
without social efforts of regulations, we might come to a point when we need to
count on the psychological stability of very few or even a single person to
determine whether humans would be threatened by robots or not.
The
last question that remains might be why humans would possibly make robots to
hate humans even if we would create communities of sociable robots? The answer
could also be as simple as what is mentioned above: for the sake of
competition......
[1] Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI &
Robotics Researchers, July 28, 2015, url:
http://futureoflife.org/AI/open_letter_autonomous_weapons
