The Upcoming Specie

Modern robots are like toddlers, it’s damn humorous to watch them fall over, but deep down we know that if we laugh at them, they might develop a complex and to start World War III against us. Yea! That's what reality is. None of humanity’s creations inspires such a confusing mix of admiration and fear. We want robots to make our lives easier, yet we can’t trust them. We’re crafting them in our own image, yet we are terrified that they might not have control over us.

But that fear is not a obstacle to the progressive field of robotics. Robots have finally grown smart enough and physically capable enough to make their way out of factories and labs to stand among us or shall I say against us. Huh!?

You may be worried a robot is going to steal your job, and we get that. You may be more likely to work alongside a robot in the near future than might replace you. 

Robots to be really useful, they’ll have to become more self-sufficient. After all, it would be impossible to program a home robot with the instructions for holding each and every object it ever might come across. You want robots to learn on its own, and that is where advances in artificial intelligence come in.

Now speaking of hospital robots, when the coronavirus crisis took hold in early 2020, a group of roboticists saw an opportunity. Robots are the perfect co-workers in a pandemic. Engineers must use the crisis, they argued in an editorial to supercharge the development of medical robots, which never get sick and can even do dangerous work that puts human medical workers in harm’s way. Robot helpers could take patients’ temperatures and deliver drugs. This would free up human doctors and nurses to do what they do best.

The rapidly developing relationship between humans and robots is so complex that it has spawned its own field, known as human-robot interaction. The challenge is easy enough to adapt robots to get along with humans but it’s another issue entirely to train humans to get along with the machines. 

What humanity has done is essentially invented a new species. What if the robots steal all our jobs? Not even white-collar workers are safe from hyper-intelligent AI, after all.

A lot of smart people are thinking about the uniqueness, when can the machines grow advanced enough to make humanity old-fashioned. Woohoo! Sarcastic. Right? Anyways, that will result in a massive societal realignment and species-wide existential crisis. What will we do if we no longer have to work? 

These seem like far-out problems, but now is the time to start thinking about them. The machines may be limited at the moment, but we as a society need to think seriously about how much power we want to have a control over robots. Take San Francisco, for eg, which is exploring the idea of a robot tax, which would force companies to pay up when they displace human workers.

The robots won’t one day turn us into batteries, is there any assurance? The more realistic scenario is that, in the world of humans and robots, we are ready to live in harmony, because it’s already happening. This is the idea of multiplicity, that you’re more likely to work alongside a robot than be replaced by one. The fact that the US economy ground to a standstill during the coronavirus pandemic made it abundantly clear that robots are not at all ready to replace human masses.

The machines promise to change virtually every aspect of human life, from health care to transportation to work. Should they help us drive? Absolutely. Should they replace nurses and cops? Ig no as certain jobs may always require a human touch as well.

One thing is absolutely clear that the machines have arrived. Now we have to figure out how to handle the responsibility of having invented a whole new species. The specie of AI i.e., specie of Robots!!!