When historians someday look back upon the inevitable human-robot wars, they’ll mark one of these incidents as the first shot, the match that lit the world on fire. All it takes is for one of these incidents to become the spark, and before we know it neo-Luddites will begin storming factories and laboratories with pitchforks and torches in the name of maintaining human dominance and superiority. If you’re still not convinced that the next world war will be waged between man and machine, you haven’t been paying enough attention.
Who knows, though? Maybe I’m just a pessimist. Whatever the case, attacks on robots are increasing as more and more human beings feel threatened by our burgeoning robotic replacements. Already, humans are lashing out at autonomous technology, vandalizing self-driving vehicles in what can only be called acts of pure man-on-machine rage. Many politicians and public figures have called for laws to protect us from the oncoming robot uprising, and lives have already been claimed in the human-robot struggle brewing on our very city streets. Still not convinced?
Some Arizona residents are fully convinced and have raised the stakes in recent weeks by carrying out brazen attacks on self-driving robotic vehicles. According to the New York Times, many of these Luddites are carrying out what can only be described as anti-robot guerilla warfare, sneaking in and out of public parks to slash tires on robotic cars waiting at streetlights or even terrorizing the cars’ human ride-along backup drivers by waving firearms at them. Others have thrown rocks at self-driving cars, run the vehicles off the road, or just stood in their front yards in their underwear, screaming impotently at the autonomous automobiles as they drive by like the good ol’ fashioned neighborhood crank that they are.
Many of these residents feel threatened by the vehicles after a self-driving car made no attempt to stop itself from striking and killing a bicyclist on an Arizona street in March 2018. Concerned Arizonans argue that technology companies like Google’s Waymo or Apple didn’t ask for their permission to be guinea pigs in their robotic car tests on public roads and argue that the cars are too unsafe to be let loose in the wild.
Of course, many of those same people use iPhones or Google search engines without thinking twice about all the data and psychometric experiments being carried out on them through those tech products, but data analytics isn’t quite as threatening as a real-life robot car driving itself around, carrying out real-life tests of the trolley problem. Either way, it’s clear people don’t want robots on their roads. What’s it going to take to get people to stop worrying and love the robots?
I have a guess. Toss a few sex robots in the backseats of the robot cars, and pretty soon we’ll be installing toilets and beds in them.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment