RoboEarth

I’m usually not one to talk about robots rising up and taking the earth from humanity and their never ending quest to render themselves obsolete. I, without any doubt or shame, have invested more time into thinking about a zombie outbreak or the super volcano in Wyoming than I have on robots. I generally think artificial intelligence is a bad idea and I think robots that can even emulate emotion are a bad idea. I also acknowledge that at this point robots are of little threat to me. Too few in number and too controlled of environments for them to escape and start murdering people like some cheap sci-fi horror film if someone somehow made the jump into actual artificial intelligence.

However, “RoboEarth”( http://www.roboearth.org/) sounded straight out of “Mass Effect” (http://masseffect.bioware.com/). I reflected on the Quarians and how the race of robots they created that linked into a neural network accidently created artificial intelligence which led to the robots rising up and the Quarians fleeing their home world en masse.  Okay, still not likely to happen anytime soon. Even though it isn’t likely doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest some thought into it. Not something to get in an uproar about but something to continue thinking about.