From Hilda Beaumont, Brighton, UK
Chris Stokel-Walker’s piece, “A very serious guide to buying a robot butler”, took me back to some research I carried out 12 years ago with some 80 pupils, who were about 12 years old, about their visions of what robots would do in the future. Domestic duties featured large in their responses, but on being asked about the implications of such activity, a significant number of the pupils suggested that this would encourage laziness, lead to humans becoming dependent on robots and to a lack of purpose in our lives. One pupil even suggested that as robots did more and more, humans would be unable to look after themselves and the human race would slowly die out. Given the current concerns about agentive artificial intelligence and how this could be embedded in domestic robots, the pupils’ concerns seem prescient (21 March, p 36).
