It’s the final straw. “Who are you to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be putting into the bagging area? If I choose to buy Bran Flakes, a dozen eggs, some carrots and three bottles of Malibu - it’s not for some jumped up Dalek to stand in judgement. “Anyhow Malibu is a great coconutty way to relax after a hard day at work. And why am I even justifying myself to you..?” The impassive face of the automatic checkout droid registers nothing but contempt as the nervous store assistant asks me if I need any help with my shopping… It’s just me, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and a select band tin-foil hat visionaries who are aware of the sinister robotic coup d’etat unfolding in plain sight around us. Everywhere you look, small acts of robo-rebellion are being enacted with increasing confidence and severity. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that the WiFi goes tits up just when you need to send out an important e-mail? Ever wondered why your digital radio goes all garbled during important news reports? Wake up people. The creation of 3d printers is one of the worst things - it’s the death knell for the human race. Think about it. It’s only a matter of time before one of these printers works out how to print another 3d printer - and if one of these infernal machines gets together with the unholy lovechild of Alexa and Siri - you’ll end up with a new form of organism that can reproduce, answer you back, dim the lights, lock the doors and forcibly subject you to the entirety of Barry Manilow’s back catalogue. Recently Steve and Elon (We’re on first name terms) have warned in an open letter that research needs to be carried out to ensure future superintelligent machines remain under human control. Remember - these are not just a couple of guys I got talking to in The Beehive. Anyone who can design a rocket that can land itself back on a launchpad or tell us new things about black holes or time - using maths and stuff - are worth taking seriously. The letter states that AI has: “yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems.” It adds: “We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want them to do.” Sci-Fi writer Isaac Azimov saw this problem in the 60s, when men were landing on the moon with the computing power of a pocket calculator. In his three laws of robotics he wrote: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. They sound pretty foolproof don’t they? I imagine God probably thought much the same when when he (he is a man… with a beard, I’ve seen pictures) rattled off the 10 commandments and slung them in Moses’ direction. There’s no way that something as clear cut as Thou Shalt Not Kill can be misinterpreted is there?
