Will Robotics and AI Enhance or Supplant Humanity?
We’re less a month away from the official start of summer, and we know what that means – the kids are home from school, and they’re invading every shopping mall, movie theater, convenience store, and our houses.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll take them somewhere with blue skies, copious amounts of sand, and gorgeous scenery.
In the meantime, our time at the workbench (or editing desk) has no off-season, so it’s back to work!
June’s issue deals with Motor Drives, Robotics, & Controls, and while the industrial and consumer sectors continue their steady march towards ubiquitous automation – for better or worse – I recently came across a rather unique robotics application, where South Korean Buddhist monks just ordained a $13,500 Unitree G1 robot.
The robot was remotely-operated – not AI – and his responses were preprogrammed. And the Unitree’s vows were specially-formulated to fit this unique occasion, pledging to “protect life, refrain from damaging property or other robots, respect and obey humans, abstain from deceptive behavior, and conserve energy by not overcharging.”
It just so happens that all of those items dovetail perfectly with the robotic misdeeds current subject to litigation.
So it’d be easy to dismiss this as a cynical publicity stunt, but it’s much more than that. Religion has often had a…shaky relationship with robotics and AI. In one of the few instances that the Vatican even acknowledged AI, the Pope recently urged the faithful to avoid “the temptation to prepare homilies with Artificial Intelligence.”
AI “will never be able to share faith,” he said. And The National Association of Evangelicals agrees, beseeching the church to “champion what AI cannot: authentic community, deep discipleship and genuine spiritual formation.”
And it’s hard to argue with that – the moment we concede the essence of what makes us human (if that’s even possible), we make ourselves irrelevant. We become the subordinate species on planet Earth. And like the Pope pointed out, the mind must be exercised like any other muscle. Every teacher and professor can attest to our waning writing abilities, due in no small part to the prevalence of Chatbots.
But others would see robotics and AI as an extension of humanity’s will. Whatever your thoughts on the grandest question of them all – evolution vs creationism – we know for sure where robots came from. And though the pervasiveness of robots and AI points to the possibility of a chaotic “singularity,” where their development is beyond our control, they could also enhance our species.
Who’s to say tomorrow’s robotics won’t work in concert with human intelligence, serving as an expedited evolutionary transformation?
Enjoy the June issue!
Best Regards,
Jason Lomberg
North American Editor, PSD
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