The Day Isaac Asimov Will Turn In His Grave

The Day Isaac Asimov Will Turn In His Grave

Generations of avid readers of science fiction, like this author, have grown up on the lore of Three Laws of Robotics defined by Isaac Asimov. To many of us these three laws are more familiar than the three postulated by the other Isaac.    

For the uninitiated, Asimov’s laws are reproduced below  :

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 the 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 Laws.

It is easy to see that these “laws” are the ones coined by the human masters to ensure that robots do not ultimately usurp controls of our destiny.  Since the robots till now have been just about “barely intelligent”, Asimov’s laws were looked upon as a mere fancy of a SF writer. 

After Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, no one can deny that the computers have a huge computing power, far more and faster than the human brain, but our efforts to make them “human” have not succeeded as yet.

So it comes as a huge shock to read a report that a robot in Volkswagen manufacturing unit near Frankfurt killed a (human) worker. This was apparently not a typical “accident” on a factory floor where let’s say a worker gets caught in a moving part of a machine or gets crushed under another. The report does not name the parties involved but let’s call the killer robot VW5-K1 (on the lines of C-3PO & R2-D2 of Star Wars) and call the victim Karl (most Germans are). Now VW5-K1, who was always supposed to remain behind a metal screen, somehow came out in the open, caught hold of the 21-year old Karl and then proceeded to slam the poor guy on a metal plate, crushing him to death.     

VW5-K1 has apparently been quarantined and is being investigated to find out what triggered this lethal  behaviour worthy of a human being. Whether it was hacked and re-programmed by some co-worker who was jealous of attention Karl was getting from Claudia from the Paint-Shop or if VW5-K1 himself had taken a fancy to Claudia and decided to have it out with Karl or whether he didn’t like the off-key tunes that Karl would hum all the time, wonder if the Robot Resources Department at VW can ever figure out that one.

On a more serious note, one must question if we humans can really hope to control the “artificial intelligence”(AI) that we are now unleashing. It is not really difficult to imagine a time when the increasingly complex world will be run by super-super intelligent computers because human brains do not have enough brain-power, at that stage such computers will quite likely come to a conclusion that in order for the world to function properly, the human race should not be in charge of the Planet Earth.  Leading scientists and thinkers like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk of SpaceX have long expressed a view that we humans will not be able to control AI and, quite likely, this will lead to the end of the human race.   

Volkswagen may decide to put VW5-K1 to sleep permanently or disintegrate him totally;  but the chances are bright that “The Rise and Fall of Humans” recorded circa A.R. 75 (Anno Roboti) will give a pride of place to VW5-K1 as the First Martyr in the “Robotic War of Independence”.  I can well picture Isaac  Asimov turning in his grave at not too distant a date in future.     

   

LazyBee aka Shirish Potnis

6^th July  2015