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Is the development of robots a good thing?

Written by Hrystyna Bobel | Archived Nov. 10, 2020

Illustration by Jake Barnard

While the Super Bowl commercials have gotten increasingly more boring over the years, there was something interesting about them this year: many of them were centered around robots.

Now, if you’re anything like me, robots with artificial intelligence and human-like qualities scare the living hell out of you. Therefore, these commercials made you a little uncomfortable and reinforced your belief that robots are a bad idea.

The atrocities humans have been responsible for are difficult to wrap our heads around. So why would we want to give those same abilities to things that are bigger, stronger, and faster than us? A rebuttal to this thought might say that robots would be engineered to only exhibit the good qualities of the human mind. But, just like the human mind, robots can be subject to illness. Machine malfunctions happen all the time.

The TV show Westworld is the perfect example. Robots are created for human advancement and pleasure. What happens when machines with an insane amount of intelligence begin to piece things together and realize they’re being used? They rise up and they start to kill us all.

I admit the thought is a little bit dramatic, but it is not that far fetched. People are killed in mechanical accidents every year. Can you imagine how many more could be killed if those machines had minds?

For the good of all living things, I think we need to take a step back from developing robots with artificial intelligence. They are a death wish. I realize this is an extremely paranoid way of thinking, but the paranoid people are usually the ones to survive in all the horror films, right?