The Robot Uprising and How to Handle It
Okay, listen up citizens. You’re all so damn worried about zombie apocalypses and imminent civil rebellion (thank you, Election Year 2016), that you’ve forgotten about the third horseman: Robot Uprising. That’s right, check the pages of Popular Science — we clever humans are hard at work engineering Armageddon. Bad enough that robots have replaced the few U.S. manufacturing jobs that haven’t migrated away, now it turns out they may have an eye on the Front Office as well. Maybe the Department of Homeland Security is afraid to tell us that we are on the cusp of a terrifying new reality. Will autonomous robots soon be walking among us, offering to serve our needs while they gather data on eliminating the “human plague?” What color Threat Level is that?
To quote Professor Stephen Hawking: “The short-term impact of AI [Artificial Intelligence] depends on who controls it; the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.” Professor Hawking is referring to an event in our theoretical future called “The Singularity,” in which AI will achieve some form of self-awareness and begin thinking for itself. Some radical futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, suggest this event could happen as soon as 2045. And that’s when the fun begins! So maybe one day in the future we will huddle around a sad, little campsite, realizing that the first time the IBM Watson supercomputer beat real humans on Jeopardy was the beginning of the end.
Here’s the good news, your humble scribe has a few survival tips for you. I recently discovered that my friend Greg works in the robotics field (a PhD actually, who knew?) and was willing to share a few insights after a few beers. So first things first, the reality of robotics and their cybernetic brainpans is still quite aways behind the Hollywood cinema threat. Turns out that if Skynet, the genocidal defense network from the Terminator movie series, became “self-aware” today and decided to come after us, we would actually have a pretty decent chance to ride it out. By the way, Skynet was actually supposed to go live and kill us all way back in April 2011. So now I present to you Dr. Greg’s Guide to Surviving the Robot Uprising (2016) — laminate and glue these rules to the outside of your apocalypse disaster kit. Here we go:
Obscure Your Face
Wear an oddly-shaped hat, cover one eye with your hand, do anything to obscure the basic human appearance of your face. If today’s robots are hunting humans, their operating rules will be looking to recognize specific human features: oval-shaped head, two eyes, nose in the middle — you get the idea. Otherwise, these non-critical thinkers would be taking out every vaguely human shaped object in the environment.
Climb Some Stairs
Forget the image of Governor Schwarzenegger’s movie villain lumbering up the staircase. Robot stalkers (circa 2016) have a hard time climbing your average set of stairs. So that’s an easy way to open up some space between you and the would-be terminator bot chasing you!
Hide Behind an Old-Fashioned Doorknob
While robots can manage a hospital-style push bar door, the current state of robotic control is still not competent enough to casually manipulate the classic rotating door knob.
Wait Them Out
With the exception of some of the big bots, like Predator and Reaper drones, that run an actual engine, most robots that roll/fly/lumber off the assembly line in 2016 depend on very limited battery life. That’s why your 12-year-old gets bored with the mini drone you bought her for Christmas! So for the most part, if you find yourself running from a deranged Santa present, just find a safe spot and hunker down for an hour or two. Game over.
Feel better now? Ready to demote the DHS Threat Level back to code blue? Well don’t let R2-D2 off the hook quite yet. There are a few more points to ponder in the Great Robot Debate.
The U.S. Defense Department is hard at work making robot soldiers to replace actual men and women on the battlefield. Forget the Terminator T-800/ Schwarzenegger Special, these “Autonomous Weapons Systems” (AWS) look more like tiny tanks with guns on them. Actually they look like something my daughter built out of Legos. The world-famous Predator and Reaper drones are another form of AWS; same idea, add wings.
If the current DOD battlebots aren’t enough to worry you, meet Atlas.
He is one of the latest projects to come out of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Now this is a bit closer to a primetime, cinema-friendly robot antagonist to meet all your Armageddon needs. At a striking 6’2” tall, he loves romantic hikes through a disaster zone, where he allegedly carries out his search and rescue operations. Blur your vision a little and see if you can imagine him in biker leather, sunglasses, and Austrian-accented one-liners. He may look awkward on paper, but check him out on YouTube and you’ll see that Atlas has some moves.
The last thing worth reflecting on is the state of robot intelligence. According to leading “roboticists” like Dr. Wolfgang Fink (and confirmed by our own Dr. Greg), there are three states of robot smarts:
· Human Controlled: We tell them what to do and they do it. Think Predator drones and remote controlled cars — we are actually behind the wheel, but from a distance.
· Rule-Based Decision Makers: This is genuine AI, a robot making its own decisions based on specific rules of engagement. The bot is not really thinking on its own, just following programmed rules based on its perception of the environment, which is why you can fake one out by changing your basic appearance with a funny hat. With the possible exception of the Watson supercomputer, today’s brightest robots are cooking along at this level of brain power — making pre-selected choices, but not thinking critically or truly self-aware.
True Autonomy: This is the singularity event I mentioned earlier, a robot brain that is actually aware of itself and its place within the environment. This is a level of intelligence that is able to make deductive choices and predict variable outcomes. This is the robot brain that (according to Professor Hawking and other Big League thinkers) may decide to chase you down Main Street or enslave you into the Matrix.
So what do you think? Can you enjoy the movie and sleep soundly now that you’ve seen a little fact to go with your (science) fiction? Thanks to Dr. Greg, I like our odds if the Robot Uprising happens tomorrow. Then again, 2045 isn’t that far away and if the future of AI scares Stephen Hawking that much, maybe it’s time to pack that disaster kit after all…
This article was submitted by Sherwood, a part-time contributor on the Home Sweet Homeland BlogTeam.
