The Robots Are Coming I can’t help but be amazed at the fact robotics is advancing so fast. If we team it up with Artificial Intelligence, we could have robots which seem to have intelligence equal to or better than our own someday. That is the scary part. It brings to mind the terminator movies and many others which portray these kinds of robots as thinking of us more or less like a virus and trying to wipe us out. When you think about the human race, we do resemble a virus in the way we operate. We multiply, and consume and pollute much as a virus does. We are not viruses however; we are caring people for the most part or try and better our conditions for everyone even if we don’t always succeed. I am not convinced robots will turn on us, and neither should you be. I don’t think anyone or any country wants to build a machine which could wipe them out without a second thought. It might be more like some future terrorist group building a robot which is programmed to kill people based on some attribute or even something they are not wearing, like a certain type of device. The U.S. Air Force uses a device to identify its planes to each other and something like this might be used. If an identification device doesn’t know the code to identify someone then the robot could be programmed to destroy them. This would only work if we couldn’t copy a captured device and replicate it or manage to hack the code so the robot would destroy anyone who did identify themselves. Computers are being hacked everyday and any computer device built is always in danger of being hacked. What is really amazing is the fact we are able to build robots on an incredible tiny scale. Recently a scientific team working at Cornell University built a robot which is so small it can not be seen with the human eye. Ten of them can fit on the period at the end of this sentence. They actually have legs. The robots are able to be steered by shooting a laser at their feet. They don’t do much yet, but just building them is an accomplishment. Think about the uses they could have when perfected. They could be used for both good and unfortunately bad. The scientists wanted to perfect them so they could be used to hunt out cancer in humans by traveling inside the body. The scientists said the biggest challenge was figuring out how to get them to move about. The robot is basically a computer chip with legs. In the future as computer chips get even smaller who knows what new ideas we will have for their use? Using robots to hunt down and destroy cancer cells has been floated around for a few years now. This idea of building tiny robots which will not only seek out cancer cells, but destroy them without hurting the surrounding healthy cells around them has been studied by many. We are getting closer to this goal every day, but it is a hard goal to perfect. Imagine how perfect these things would have to be in order to do this task. Thousands of them would be swimming around in your blood and you wouldn’t want them to clog up arteries or veins, attack the wrong cells or get into the wrong places. They could turn out to be a horror which we might not be able to reverse. The idea of weaponizing them is also scary. There are probably a lot of ways this could be done. One thing which comes to mind is putting them in someone’s food and having them ingest them without knowing it. Once inside if they were radio controlled the person would be at the mercy of the person with the controller. If they didn’t do what they were told he could kill them at any time by just sending a signal with his cell phone. The Russians killed someone in England by injection when walking by and were found out a couple of years ago. This would be an even easier way to assassinate someone by putting the robots in food or perhaps a drink. Tiny robots are not the only advances being made. The trend today is having robots do everything as far as taking control of driving, flying and even sailing. It is only a short matter of time before every nation has robot tanks. The Russians tested the Uran-9 and were quite happy with it. The United States also has robot tanks and I suppose so does China and others. The idea is to fill the battlefield with robots instead of troops. One has to wonder if this will increase collateral damage among civilians. Many times, soldiers might avoid firing on something if civilians are there but the robots probably will never hesitate. One of the ideas I found intriguing was the exoskeleton which each individual soldier would wear. They would allow a soldier to travel further and faster without fatigue and lift hundreds of pounds. This in itself is amazing, but there is more, the exoskeleton might be able to double as a second soldier if taken off. That is what the military is talking about. Another use for the exoskeleton is as sort of an ambulance. If the soldier is wounded the exoskeleton would be able to take him back to base for medical treatment. It doesn’t look like the giant robots we see in science fiction movies have any place in the future except perhaps in some sort of entertainment like the recent bout between Japanese and American giant robots. People might actually pay to see this which in turn would mean these giant robots would be built in limited numbers. There is something about watching robots that seems to appeal to many of us. Robot planes are beginning to fill our skies. You probably know them better as drones. Some of them are full size fighter planes but most are smaller but pack the same punch since no cockpit is really needed. One fighter with a pilot can now control many of these drones at one time from his plane. We will probably see hundreds of these drones in the sky at one time during a military engagement. Robots are here to stay and they will only get smarter as time goes by.
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