Road to hell is paved with good intentions. Or is it?

I should have known! I should have known!

A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio show had someone on speaking about robotics the other day. They said his name was Tom Williams, and that he was an expert on robotics based in Minnesota.

During his attempts at explaining the advantages and disadvantages of artificial intelligence, Mr. Williams said, unequivocally, that it had been American science-fiction author Isaac Asimov who had invented the word “robot.”

That’s when my ears perked, and I started looking for Mr. Williams to ask him whether he meant what he had said.

The closest I came to a Mr. Williams as a person learned in robotics was here (verbatim quote): an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines, where he directs the Mines Interactive Robotics Research Lab. Prior to joining Mines, Tom earned a joint PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Tufts University in 2017.

No matter how hard I looked, I haven’t found any reliable trace in Minnesota. But, for the purposes of this thumb-sucking article, I will not be assuming that the CBC placed him in a wrong spot.

A huge howler

The broadcaster’s mistake was worse: its interviewer was not aware that Isaac Asimov himself, whenever speaking about the origins of the word “robot,” would always give credit where it’s due.

Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote a play named R.U.R. in 1920. The abbreviated title stands for Rossumovi Universální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play premiered January 2, 1921 in Hradec Králové in north-eastern Bohemia. That’s whence the word “robot” comes.

The title is based on Čapek’s creativity with his language: the word Rossum is based on “rozum” which in Czech means reason, “robot” is based on “robota” as in forced labour or serfdom.

The play took off with a vengeance: it was translated into 30 languages by 1923, just within two years of its world premiere.

Spoiler warning: Čapek’s robots would eventually rise up against their human creators, and people would lose the battle for survival.

Which brings me directly to Del Bigtree, an American film and television producer, who, as the CEO of the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network, produced the film Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, thus earning undying hatred from the current establishment.

Mr. Bigtree found an AI site that claims to be capable of creating music, including lyrics, within mere seconds.

He inserted a few words that he wanted the artificial song to convey, instructed the application about the style he wanted it to be played in, clicked on a submit key, and waited all of 10 seconds.

And then he received perfect studio-quality recording that would take a living creators’ team at least 24 hours to put together.

He recorded the event and had it broadcast on the web by Brighteon.com, including his own comment. Basically, Mr. Bigtree said, this could (and would) kill an entire segment of entertainment industry.

That’s not all: using AI to create content for news outlets means that the application will be using information it had been fed, rejecting any kind of human curiosity and independent research.

The definition according to which most if not all of scientific research moves ahead one funeral at a time would be dead and forgotten as students would be taught that only accepted dogma is permissible, and everything else is anathema.

We can see it now already as indoctrination based on virulent ideology has become pervasive in most of learned halls of academia, and we bow before the tenured crowd as we would before the undeserving crowned heads.

The conflict between humans and their automated creations is just round the corner.

Not so long ago, in 1997, IBM’s Big Blue computer took on reigning world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was a tense battle. But Big Blue won both the original set of games and the subsequent rematch.

As IBM’s C. J. Tan put it (too generously, for my taste): “Garry prepared to play against a computer. But we programmed it to play like a grandmaster.”

That’s what awaits humanity if we don’t wake up soon enough.

Tagged: ai, artificial-intelligence, robotics, robots, Technology