Maybe it’s because the obvious and certain application is going to be to attach a gun and use it to police anti-dictatorship protests without having to worry about keeping the lower-level police and soldiers on your side.
The robot takeover dystopia doesn’t require some bullshit “singularity”. Human oligarchs will still be at the top.
So far every actual use of robotics has been to make “little people” irrelevant, so that the wealthy no longer need to consider taking any care of them in order to perpetuate their lifestyles and power. If we had a political system where this dynamic had been successfully quashed, then sure, let’s build more robots to do things people don’t want to do, but until then, this is always the final product:
People already don’t want to do those jobs. It’s why in a pandemic you don’t see orchards full of white people picking apples or elder care homes sending their patients out to their loving families. Applications for automation are broken because our society is broken in deeply systemic ways. I don’t disagree with you, but automation could be a solution instead of a problem. Of course, we have to remake our societal reward structure first, but since we don’t seem to be willing to do that ourselves, maybe a couple of pandemics and global natural disasters will help.
Or we’ll just continue to double down on a broken system that benefits a vanishingly small percentage of the population.
It’s tough for me to get excited about a lot of tech these days. Robotics and their applications in real life outside of factories have always fascinated me and have always been a bright spot that I get enthusiastic about. I want to see robots do cool things out and about that help lots of people, like what Baymax in Big Hero 6 was designed for, and I’m not going to let the relentless pessimism and cynicism of everything else in the world stop me from dreaming on that front.
If the problem a robot is meant to solve is labor costs, then we need to work on systemic changes that enable the people that are doing that soon-to-be-automated job gain a better one that won’t be automated, or be able to live their life on a basic income if they so choose.
I have a love for all things aviation, including military aircraft. The social impact of my obsession is that I simply don’t get to connect with a lot of people in a field that I am very knowledgeable in, either people like military aviation because it means “freedom” (gross), or people can’t see anything more than a 2 billion dollar murder weapon (not untrue).
Well someone has to push back. Industry is only going to push forward, with politicians in their pocket, to do whatever they want with technology. So the deck’s already stacked against us if we want to avert harmful tech.
So we invoke what our artists have foreseen as a worst-case scenario. It has to be done. If we cheerlead for this crap, there’s nothing to stop them from doing whatever they want. At least with a little bit of knee-jerk hatred directed toward tech companies then maybe, possibly, when they produce something unequivocally horrific it might be slowed down a bit. Didn’t prevent Facebook but we keep trying.
