Their growing physical capabilities, combined with AI’s rapid strides, may pose an existential crisis for our species
The world changed on Feb 10, 1996, when IBM’s Deep Blue computer beat Garry Kasparov at a game of chess.
It changed again last Sunday, when a humanoid robot beat the men’s half-marathon record by a mile, in Beijing. Nobody doubted it would happen someday, but not so soon after last year’s fiasco, when the winning robot made it to the finish line in 2 hours and 40 minutes.
This year’s winner took just 50 minutes and 26 seconds, averaging 25kmph. How fast could humanoid robots be next year? T-1000, chasing cars and bikes in 1991’s Terminator 2 , doesn’t look unrealistic anymore.
There are much faster robots, of course. A driverless bullet train doing 350kmph, for example. But we don’t feel challenged by them.
Humanoid robots, on the other hand, fascinate us with their form, and their possibilities. Nobody’s afraid of a string puppet that looks and acts human. But an autonomous human-shaped robot that appears to think better than us, and outperforms us physically, is threatening.
Happily, there aren’t too many of them around at the moment. Last year, only 14,500 were sold across the world, 90% of them made in China. But robot evangelists see a big shift coming. Musk, who’s developed the Optimus robot, plans to make a million every year. Morgan Stanley predicts over a billion humanoids in service by 2050.
That could be a problem. If tireless robots, who never demand downtime, replace blue-collar work, what will the vast majority of humans do?
When Czech writer Karel Capek coined the word ‘robot’ in 1920 – robota means slave labour in Czech – he was worried industrialisation was turning humans into machines. Now the fear is, machines will make humans redundant.
We could do nursing and caring jobs – at least that was the hope – but Big Tech doesn’t want that. Remember 2016’s Audrey Hepburn-inspired Sophia robot? It had a patented skin to form 62 facial expressions.
While it was glib then, current AI would boost its conversational skills exponentially. And ask yourself, what’s the point of humanoid robots with hands and sensitive fingers? You don’t need those features to weld car frames in factories.
They are there to operate machines made for humans – microwaves, dishwashers, TV remotes – change bedsheets, pour coffee. We might thank humanoids when they do dangerous rescue jobs after earthquakes and fires, but generally, we’ll watch their growing capabilities with a wary eye.
Even Johnny Sokko, that once-famous Manga comic character, who would be 70-something now, ought to keep tabs on his Flying Robot.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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