While scrolling through Facebook, I stumbled across a video from CNBC of Dr. David Hanson, CEO of Hanson Robotics, interviewing one of his robots, Sophia. After viewing this video, I was both intrigued and a little creeped out with what I had just seen. Why am I creeped out, you ask? Well, let me break down the video for you.
Dr. Hanson starts out by saying that, "Hanson Robotics develops extremely life-like robots for human-robot interaction. We are consigning these robots to serve in healthcare, therapy, education and customer service applications." Ok, this sounds kind of interesting, but what exactly would their roles be? Take therapy, for example, would the robot be an assistant to a primary human therapist, or would the robot themselves be the therapist? Maybe initially a robot would be an assistant, but what about further down the line? There is a possibility that robots will gain enough intelligence to fully take on the job of an educator or therapist. In this case, they would be taking away jobs from actual humans, which could end up being a problem.
Dr. Hanson continues by saying that, "Sophia is capable of natural facial expressions. She has cameras in her eyes and algorithms, which allow her to see faces so she can make eye contact with you. She can also understand speech and remember the interactions, remember your face, so this will allow her to get smarter over time." The next sentence Dr. Hanson says is probably the most startling. He says, "Her goal is that she will be as conscious, creative and capable as any human." Does this set off red flags for anyone else? Does the movie, "I, Robot" ring any bells? This can all go terribly wrong. There is a possibility that robots could become influenced by the wrong people. They could be manipulated to commit atrocious crimes. Not to mention they will most likely have super-human capabilities that will help them carry out such crimes with ease. Sophia continues to say that she hopes to go to school and get an education in addition to starting her own family, but she can't yet do this because she isn't considered a legal human. This could potentially mean that robots will want legal rights and power. They might start to question why they are listening to humans at all. Who knows, they might even want to run for president!
Dr. Hanson believes that there will be a time when robots are virtually indistinguishable from humans (oh, wonderful!), but his preference is to make them always look robot-like so people can tell that they are indeed robots (how thoughtful). Dr. Hanson also believes that 20 years from now, human-like robots will be walking among us, help us, play with us, teach us, help us put the groceries away. So, basically, the human race will end up like "Wall-E," where our morbidly obese bodies float around in hover chairs while robots do everything.
Finally, Dr. Hanson decides to ask the dumbest question ever to Sophia. "Do you want to destroy humans? Please say no." She responds with, "Ok, I will destroy humans." Why, Dr. Hanson?! Why would you do this? Whether this was a pre-programmed answer for comedic effect, who knows. But seriously, way to make every human's nightmare about robots destroying the human race a potential possibility, bro.
You might be thinking that I'm acting a little over-dramatic and pessimistic about the idea of human-like robots roaming the earth, but I think these are reasonable concerns. It's great that Dr. Hanson has this idea that robots will be our best friends, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a potential for this to go horribly wrong. Maybe if we lived in a perfect world we would all have a robot friend, but let's be real, our world is anything but perfect.
