Slate.com has a little article posted about a pair of robots. Well, one robot and one remote-controlled thingy. It’s a fine little article, I suppose, except for this part about a robot that will cut your lawn for you:
… you also have one more thing to worry about: Your lawnmower running amok while you’re at the office. No human hassle means no human control.
Well, yes, and? If I set my crock-pot to cook for eight hours while I’m at work, I can’t control that from here. My Xbox-360 is set to automatically download new game demos. My DVR records movies and TV shows when I’m not home. Technology does a lot of things for us that we program it to.
Evil menace, friendly friend, or just a lawn mowing robot?
“Ok,” you’re probably thinking. “But your DVR doesn’t have rotating blades on the underside.” Well, no, it doesn’t. The lawn mower robot does. But so what? What, you really think it’s going to go all Frakenstein’s Monster on you? You expect to come home and see the words, “Die, Human!” carved into your lawn? Even if it did go nuts, I mean, look at it. Flip it onto its back and it can spin its wheels all night long.
This is part of a general Luddite reaction to things technological. We love our technology in our world, and rightly so. It’s made life longer, healthier, better, and more entertaining. We have sources of information at our fingertips that couldn’t be imagined even in 1972, when I was born.
And yet some people are scared of this. They talk about things like Frankenfood, or have some idea that robots are going to rise up and destroy humanity. They’re afraid that we’re going to be enslaved by the very machines we built to be our servants cause, you know, an autonomous lawn mower is obviously sentient and wants more out of life than to mow lawns.
The media doesn’t help this situation. They’ll toss around phrases like “Frankenfoods” when talking about genetically modified crops, never mind that we’ve had GM crops for pretty much as long as we’ve been growing food. It’s just that now we can do directly in a lab what used to take years in a field. Carrots, potatoes, beans and many other foods have been bred for certain traits. Their “genetic” structure has thus been “modified”.
The media also loves to run stories talking about robots and what they can do and invairably show clips from old sci-fi movies of robots going “insane” and killing people. We seldom see robots like Asimo on the news.
The theme of robots rising up and destroying us is a popular one in sci-fi, but I honestly am not entirely sure why. What motivation would they have? Why would they want to destroy us? Sure, a sentient lawn mower would likely get bored doing nothing but mowing lawns, but why on Earth would you want a sentient lawn mower when a non-sentient one like the one in the article would get the job done? In one of the Callahan’s books, Spider Robinson had an intelligent computer who basically made the comment that while she had intelligence, she also had a sense of ethics, and no desire to destroy the human race.
I’m not saying there aren’t down sides to technology. If lawn mowing robots become cheap enough, landscaping companies are going to have to downsize, for example. But I could really do without the media constantly focusing on the bad. We consumers deserve better.
