From driverless cars to robot waiters to even the use of smarter drones, ignore the nay-sayers who insist robot technology will leave millions jobless and all of us worse off (unless, of course, you are that poor woman whose hair was eaten by a Roomba). In fact, the technological revolution is maturing and inevitable, according to a panel by Reason at the International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington D.C. Friday.
With 10 million Roombas vacuuming our laminate floors across the globe and algorithms sorting your e-mail and deciding what is important for you, “the robot revolution has already happened,” said Katherine Mangu-Ward, managing editor at Reason, “and we didn’t really notice.”
Mangu-Ward called objections to robotic technology, which the panel defined as “mechanical agents that perform tasks for you semi-autonomously,” the same objections that have been raised about past technological development.
President John F. Kennedy even raised concerns about job loss in his speech to Congress on the Apollo space mission, said Mangu-Ward.
Indeed, in 1961 Kennedy promised “a new Manpower Development and Training program, to train or retrain several hundred thousand workers, … in order to replace those skills made obsolete by automation and industrial change.”
“That’s the exact same rhetoric you could imagine Obama using,” said Mangu-Ward.
Drones and warbots could even be “much more moral than human soldiers,” said Reason’s science and technology reporter Ron Bailey, because they would not experience fear, panic, or feelings of revenge during war.
But, Mangu-Ward countered, warbots could then be “only as moral as their programmers.” And then, noted an audience member, war would be conducted with an even greater “civilian disassociation with people less involved, less interested in their government’s war.”
While much of the technology the panel discussed exists and is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, answers to emerging ethical questions are not. It may be unwise to depend on robots to help us fight more moral and less deadlly wars in the future.
After all, in 1861, Doctor Richard Gatling introduced into the American Civil War the Gatling Gun, the first firearm to solve the problems of loading, reliability, and sustained firing. Gatling hoped the deadly carnage caused by the gun would be enough to bring the world to renounce war. Instead, nations added the new weapon to their arsenals.
