Technology will Kill Us
As technology gets more advanced every day, it’s becoming more and more of a threat to humankind. Today, I’m going to talk about why companies are still making them and what might happen if we don’t address this soon.
What We are Facing
As the bleeding edge robots become more and more capable of doing tasks that human can, it’s also capable of doing something that human cannot. Kind of like this boxing robot (Check it out here). As it gets more and more practice with real people, it will learn more and more every time around starts with a learning algorithm. Take this program of hide-and-seek, the blue robot is simply given the task of hiding from the red robots while the red robot is given the simple task of finding the blue robots (Check it out here). It’s fascinating to see that the robots get more and more advanced strategies like how the hiders create a fort from scratch and the seekers to learn to use a box to surf.
Just like you see in the video, very similar things happen in real life. From your Google voice assistance to NASA’s most advanced robots. You can probably see where I’m going with this. Imagine that the robots were given the simple task to protect the environment and it started to see humankind as a threat, it might start killing us. The problem is that we never coded it or teach it to kill humans, but the robot learned it by itself.
Why are Companies Doing This?
Companies know, all the companies know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. So, why are companies doing this? They know that robots taking out humans to make their goal is entirely possible. Simply put, they are doing this as a competition, they are competing to make the best possible robot to replace humans. It’s already happening, in factories, they use machines instead of humans. Every company wants to have a machine instead of a human, they don’t need lunch breaks, and they don’t need to be paid a monthly salary. You buy the machine and that’s it, except for the repairs, they are a one-time payment thing.
They are doing this because buying machines is a lot cheaper than paying humans. They will still need a manager, of course. Just in case something has gone wrong, there still needs to be a human with flesh and blood to fix it. From a company and financial perspective, it makes total sense. It saves cost, it’s more effective. But what about for us, from a consumer perspective?
What It Means for Consumers
Surprisingly enough, it also kind of makes sense. Robots are more efficient, they don’t have things like human error or they won’t forget things. Robots are also much faster than any human ever can, instead of scanning the QR code in another machine, they can scan it themselves. You don’t have to deal with how the cashier might have a temper either, because robots don’t have emotions.
Some people might prefer having a real human to help them with customer support, so there should still be a human manager on standby in case the robots have errors.
The Future of Technology
It’s never easy to predict the future of technology as it’s forever changing whenever we get a new breakthrough. The general direction though, is that robots will start replacing human jobs one by one. Although robots taking our current jobs will create new job opportunities, there will never be as many as they took. Soon, having humans work for you will be a luxury. The human salesman outside the Gucci store will speak 10 different languages with double PHDs.
Just in the last decade, computers have gotten a billion times more powerful. From a calculator that takes up the size of an entire room to it become inside your pocket. We could also get so technologically advanced that we make our own demise. We could be so reliant on technology that we become physically weak and incapable. It might seem far-fetched and unlikely now, but as technology advances, we are inching ever closer to that future.
