The fact that the Financial Times special series on robots has been framed around the question “Robots: friend or foe?” is fascinating to me. I understand that change is scary, and that the cyborg from The Terminator is really scary. But my reading of the evidence is that the rapid changes we are seeing in artificial intelligence, sensor development and many other fields are not sending us hurtling towards a future in which the machines become self-aware and take over. Worrying about that future is so misplaced that, as the AI pioneer Andrew Ng puts it, it is like worrying about overpopulation . . . on Mars.
A much more proximate and real threat, and hence a scarier one, is that of economic dislocation. Robots (a term I am using here as shorthand for the modern, rapidly expanding toolkit of digital technologies) are quickly learning lots of skills — everything from understanding natural language to diagnosing disease to driving cars — that used to be the preserve of human beings alone. These skilful machines are going to spread throughout the world’s economies in the years to come, and they are going to automate some people, perhaps many of them, out of their jobs.
Surely this means that robots are our foes? No, it absolutely does not. To believe otherwise is to reduce us humans to the status of mere labourers — and that is an offensively reductive view of our species.