While reading Robin Marantz Henig’s “Death by Robot,” I was reminded of a recent successful movie: Avengers: Age of Ultron. In the article, Henig discusses how we are currently striving to construct autonomous robots capable of making ethical decisions. This reminded me of a common trope used in science fiction films: the uprising of the robots.
Whenever humans construct artificially intelligent robots, the majority of the time, these robots begin to question why they are taking orders from their creators. As Henig mentions in the article, humans cannot process information as quickly as a computer can. Humans are also blinded by the emotions that robots cannot possess. In the robots’ minds, this makes the humans weaker. This is especially true for the character of Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron. In the video below, you can hear some of his best quotes, where he harps on humanity’s weaknesses.
Ultron was created as a peacekeeping force. However, similar to the ethical dilemmas presented in “Death by Robot,” Ultron is faced with his own dilemma: his creators cause some of the most damage, death, and destruction in the world. Thus, Ultron decides that the only way to create peace on the world would be to eradicate humanity entirely.
This story seems quite familiar to me—man creates machine, machine attempts to usurp man, man destroys machine. Whenever a robot seems capable of making ethical decisions, it realizes that humans are some of the least ethical creatures on the Earth, and that the Earth could do a lot better without us. Through media such as Avengers: Age of Ultron and I, Robot, humanity is taught to fear the day when robots and computers are able to make the same ethical decisions as humans. They can do so faster, and in some cases, better than humanity ever could. This begs the question though: do we really want robots to realize how much more capable they are?