GenX Turns Fifty

This week Elon Musk announced the Tesla “Cybercab”.

At the same time he announced “We, robot everything”

Which leads us to ask the obvious question “Would you trust an autonomous system?”. Even if it was built by Elon Musk’s Tesla?

System engineering safety into a product is a difficult task. Notice I said “into”. You absolutely cannot add safety onto a product as an additional feature.

Entering this new era, do we actually trust the engineers and scientists with our lives? We will need a lot more proof and unfortunately unless the products are built along with proving we can trust them, then it is just a matter of time before a human is harmed or killed (unintentionally or intentionally) by robot enabled by artificial intelligence.

The “nature” of artificial intelligence is that it supposes to “learn”. How can we prove that the system is learning in a fashion that it cannot harm humans? One attempt is to provide AI with “rules”. But can we see laws and rules are routinely broken by humans, why would not AI, fashioned after human “thinking” follow suit?

Issac Asimov’s thinking was far beyond his era. In his series, “I, Robot”, written from 1940 to 1950 put forth his Three Laws of Robotics”:

(From Wikipedia)

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”, are:

• The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

We today see the potential violation of his fictional laws by the widespread use of drone warfare in the current war on Ukraine. Some may argue that drones are not humanoid robots, but it is just a short step to robot assisted armies.

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited about a time we all get our own “R2-D2”. A robot providing help and responding to our calls for assistance. But it will be a long time, 20 or 30 years before we get this right.

By that time, most of us Generation X will be in our 70s and 80s. But we can dream. Look backward 20-30 years and knowing use of smartphones began in the mid 2000s. Today we have instant video conferencing from mobile devices we could only imagine what technology we have today.

So that is what I predict. Mid 2040s humanoid robots become common. Autonomous transportation becomes mainstream. The Jetson’s world begins to become a reality.

Only problem now is it always takes longer than we think it will take. But as humans, we continue to create and invent.

We are truly made in the image of The Creator. We just must be cautious not to play god. That will enviably lead to disaster.