A man died in an industrial accident at a Volkswagen factory in Germany Wednesday. Normally, this would have been little noted — industrial accidents are unfortunately common, with an estimated 4,000 workplace deaths every year in the U.S. alone.But this man had the misfortune to have been killed in the process of installing safety software on one of the factory's robots.The news flashed around the world, every headline a variation on the classic "man bites dog" — Robot Kills Man. To make matters more ominous, one of the reporters tweeting about the story was the Financial Times' Sarah O'Connor — who was apparently unaware of the Terminator franchise featuring her namesake, Sarah Connor, and didn't understand why so many of her replies talked about something called Skynet becoming self-aware.Never mind that the robot in question was a relatively prosaic piece of machinery, a giant arm designed to operate within a cage, far away from humans. Never mind that, according to the preliminary assessment, the worker was at fault. Never mind that since the first robot-related death was reported in 1979, we've seen fewer than one such incident per year. Toilets, zippers and pants all cause more deaths than robots.But we see what we want to see, and apparently what we want to see is the robopocalypse.This fear-filled approach isn't limited to industrial robots. Witness the scare headlines that greeted news, back in May, that Google's fleet of 48 self-driving cars have been involved in 11 accidents during 6 years and 1.7 million miles of road-testing.None of these accidents resulted in anything more serious than a bended fender. And crucially, none of them were found to be the fault of the self-driving vehicle. It was human drivers doing the side-swiping and rear-ending. A few of the accidents were the fault of the driver that's required to be behind the wheel of the autonomous vehicle.
In short, we're the menace. We're the danger. We're attacking robots, not the other way around. Not even the most advanced artificial intelligence has that kind of ability; they may never be smart enough to commit murder. So why are our heads stuck in Skynet-style scenarios?Science fiction plays a role, of course. Our "exaggerated expectations and exaggerated fears about robots" are due to people who have been "oversensitised by sci-fi movies and stories in the media," Bristol Robotic Laboratory Professor Alan Winfield suggested to the Financial Times.This has been going on ever since 1921, when the word "robot" was first introduced to the language in the science fiction play, R.U.R., which featured a machine revolt that killed every human on Earth but one. (Sorry, Terminator fans, but James Cameron's plot for the original movie wasn't entirely original.) Killer robots and computers also cropped up in Metropolis, 2001 and many more movies.
But that wasn't the whole story of sci-fi. Isaac Asimov stories such as I, Robot were incredibly sympathetic to the cybernetic (the movie version, not so much), as was Steven Spielberg's A.I. Star Wars gave us droids we cared desperately about. Why then do we persist in behaving like the bartender at the Mos Eisley cantina, who doesn't serve "their kind" in here?
What we're really talking about is a primitive urge that goes back far further than 1921. It's what drove the first Luddites to smash mill owners' machines in Manchester — the fear, not of the technology itself, but of its impact in the workplace. We fear replacement. We fear becoming obsolete, itself a kind of death.
That's a legitimate concern, and we need to have that conversation. Industrial robots, computer software and online algorithms are squeezing humans out of jobs every day. What do we do about that? What kind of protectionism, if any, should be in place? How do we re-educate and train our workforce?
It's not a sexy question, and you'll definitely get more attention if you talk about Skynet and the rise of the robots. But the more we pepper ourselves with that kind of distraction, the less self-aware you'll actually be.
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