• Question: Is it possible in your opinion that robots could take over the world and possibly lead to the endangerment of the human species ??

    Asked by Bethany to Huma on 7 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Huma Shah

      Huma Shah answered on 7 Nov 2016:

      Hello Bathany, Great question and very topical. Some people are definitely concerned – there’s a conference at Cambridge University next month, Dec 12-14, organised by the Centre to Study Existential Risk (CSER) to humanity from intelligent machines: http://cser.org/cccr2016/

      I personally don’t think this way – although I fully appreciate that in the future smart machines might do the designing and building of smarter machines. We do need to get it right in creating smart machines in the first place. Robotics and artificial intelligence needs more young people coming through to study this area so they have a say in how public money is used for research in these topics. More and diverse teams, including male and female artists, designers, historians, sociologists working alongside engineers and computer scientists could help to build ethical and moral new technologies, including carer/companion robots.

      Robots might end up showing us humans how unethical we are, how we mistreat the planet and other humans. So intelligent robots might make us more humane and share the planet’s resources equally.

      Really hope you are interested in taking up robotics in higher education, it’s a very exciting field 🙂

      Huma

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