Global Warming-Pffft!

Hopw about Terminator Robots on the rampage. That’s more of a threat!

Science fiction has portrayed machines capable of thinking and acting for themselves with a mixture of both anticipation and dread, but what was once the realm of fiction has yet again become the subject of serious debate as robots become more intelligent.

In 1981, Kenji Urada hopped a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out maintenance work on a robot. While working on the machine, the robot reached out and pushed 37-year-old Japanese factory worker into a grinder with its powerful hydraulic arm.

Urada’s death is often said to mark the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot, although Robert Williams was killed by a robot two years earlier. Since both deaths, and despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, there have been many more gruesome industrial fatalities involving robots crushing humans, smashing their heads and even pouring molten aluminum over them. And as robots emerge from the factory floor into homes and workplaces, and develop to a point where they can make their own decisions, there are growing demands that they should be bound by ethical laws.

South Korea, which spends about $80 million a year to develop robots, predicts there will be a robot in every household in little more than a decade. This is not necessarily worth writing home about — robot vacuum cleaners, which can “decide” for themselves when to move from room to room, as well as robotic toys and lawnmowers, are already in many households — except that the country’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy’s robot team also predicts these robots would develop “strong intelligence.”

Indeed, the creation of a superhumanly intelligent artificial intelligence (AI) system could be possible within 10 years, with an “AI Manhattan Project,” Dr. Ben Goertzel, CEO and Chief Scientist of AI firm Novamente LLC and bioinformatics firm Biomind LLC, recently wrote.

Of course, they biggest threat they pose is to illegal immigrants. They would eventually replace manual laborers.

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