The topic we discussed a lot throughout the semester was how robots are taking over in the future. To be honest I found this topic absurd until I found myself in the self-driving Uber in the middle of Pittsburgh. In the article Death by Robot by Robin Marantz Henig there is an example of a robot who is taking care of an elderly woman who just broke two ribs. The real concern about the robot started to happen when Sylvia (an elderly woman) asked him for a dose of painkillers. How should the robot handle that situation? A robots priority should be to help a human without hurting one, but what criteria is the robot supposed to use in deciding what the best option is for a human? When my teammate and I got in the Uber, there were two guys sitting in the front seat. The guy who was sitting behind the wheel turned out to be the guy who created the self-driving uber. He explained to us later on that there are only couple of them throughout the United States and that they were still being heavily tested. He acknowledged the pitfalls of a self-driving uber, but he strongly believed that in the range of five to ten years we won’t be able to see an uber with a driver in the car. While he had to drive through downtown himself, he let the car drive itself once we got on a highway. It was a pretty amazing experience to watch how the car was reacting to other cars. To be honest there was not a single moment where I did not feel safe in the car. As I stepped outside the uber I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I was amazed at how technology is beginning to dominate more and more facets of our lives. For the first time I was able to acknowledge that things that seemed so distant from reality are actually right around the corner. Robots and AI are definitely going to replace humans in a lot more complicated tasks, which leads to the logical assumption that a lot of jobs will be rendered useless for humans, and then one has to wonder, where does our economy go from there?
Retrieved from: www.businessinsider.com/how-ubers-driverless-cars-work-2016-9%5B/caption%5D