Autonomous Machines — Sci-fi becomes Science Fact

When I was young, one of the scariest films I watched was Westworld, and where Yul Bruner played the robotic gunslinger who just would give up. In the film, a software bug drove “him” to misfunction. But these days, could you also add a cyber or ransomware attack?

Well, imagine a world where autonomous machines decided that they wanted to go out in the evening rather than being constrained by their owners, and where robots vehicles cleaned the streets and picked up refuge. With the power of computers, the reality of machines not obeying their “owners” is now with us, and we must understand the risks that these pose to our society.

In a classic Red Dwarf, even a toaster had its own personality:

In another episode, the vending machines decided to go on strike, as they wanted to do something other than their given roles.

The rise of the autonomous and intelligent machine projects a work where machines can reason and make their own decisions. At the far end of the spectrum is where a machine either makes the wrong decisions…