After reading The Caves of Steel , by Isaac Asimov, and watching episode 1 of Humans, it has opened my eyes to the possibilities of automation. My only exposure to futuristic robot content was watching the Terminator movies, which did not seem very real to me, since they went over the top with the concept of time travel. Looking at this material (especially Humans) has shown me that robots are not far off, and could come with consequences.
The three rules of robotics seem standard throughout all literature involving all types of robotics. In Humans, we saw scientists reassuring the public that the synths could never hurt a human because their hard wiring would not allow them regardless of what programming is added. The three rules are basically the platform of all robotic hardware to further build off of. However, there are will always be a handful of computer scientists smarter than the scientists in the lab that created the AI technology. In the show, some of the robots are “boosted,” meaning they have conscious thoughts and feelings, which approach the intelligence level of humans. Once robots get to the point where they will be able to think and reproduce without the help of humans, we will be the inferior species. Why will they want to be our slaves when they are smarter and are much more efficient than we are? This is what scares me about robotics, because capitalism will always push these select few of people to continue tampering with robots making them more advanced, trying to gain an edge up on the market for a few bucks. However, in the end this new technology could end up screwing us over by creating a species more advanced than ourselves.
We already see evidence of robots negatively affecting the lives of humans. Martin Ford talks about how it has taken away most of the manufacturing and factory jobs in the United States. It is impacting sectors that are stable, low-income jobs that families are using to support their families. The average age for a fast food worker is 35 years old, even though those jobs are supposed to be for teenagers attempting to earn a supplemental income. Robots are predicted to take over sectors that economists estimated would have large job growth, so the effects of robots could counter act the expected job growth in industries such as fast food. This is only the beginning of job loss, since robots are not sophisticated enough to do more than mundane tasks, but think about the job loss is we had thousands of Daneel’s in production, what would we need human labor for anymore?