Robert Brockway - Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody

That was pretty neat [how] it was smart enough to know not to do that.

Cunning investigative work there, Dr. Arvidson! Did you get a cookie for that deduction?

Martian Lander Operator:Hey, Ray, you’re our lead investigator for off-world robotic omens of sentience; what’s with this Mars Rover giving me the bird when I told it to do its damn job?

Professor Arvidson:I think that’s neat.

Martian Lander Operator:Awesome work, Ray. You can go back to your coloring book now and—hey! Hey! Stay in the lines, Ray, that coloring book cost the American taxpayer eight million dollars and goddamn it, zebras aren’t purple, Ray .

Do you know what this development means? This means that NASA just gave robots the ability to believe in themselves . According to motivational posters with kittens on them around the world, now that they believe in themselves, they can achieve anything .

• Scissors

• Lasers

• Your daughter

• Vengeance

• Confidence

But hell, Rover the Optimistic Smart-ass Robot is all the way up on Mars. Let’s focus our worries planetside for now: The Department of Defense is field-testing a new battle droid called the DevilRay, which, in a nutshell, is an autonomous flying war bot. Now, the U.S. military loves all these autonomous battle droids because they enable soldiers to engage the enemy without taking any flak themselves, but the main drawback of a war bot is that they have to stop killing eventually—if only for a second—in order to refuel. Well, no longer! The most alluring aspect of the DevilRay is how it makes use of downward-turned wingtips for increased low-altitude stability, an onboard GPS, and a magnometer to locate power lines and, thanks to the power of electromagnetic induction (read: electricity straw), the ability to skim existing commercial power lines to refuel. In theory, this gives the DevilRay essentially infinite range, and if you don’t find that prospect disturbing—an unmanned robot fighter jet that can pursue its enemies for infinity—perhaps you’re forgetting one little thing: Your home, your loved ones, and your soft, delicious flesh are all now well within the range of battle-ready flying robots armed to the teeth and named after Satan.

Self-preservation instincts and infinite power supplies won’t help our robot adversaries, however, if they can’t reason at some level approaching human, and that’s our chief advantage. Of course there’s a substantial amount of research into artificial intelligence these days, but it’s all strictly ethereal—it’s not like that stuff’s got a body. There are chat bots and stock predictors and game simulators and chess-playing noncorporeal nancy boys in the robot kingdom, but even if a robot can crash the stock market, at least it can’t crash a car into your living room. Nobody’s stupid enough to give a rival intelligence an unstoppable robot body… right?

Uh… please?

• Bumblebees

• Kittens

• Infants

No such luck. It turns out there are brilliant scientists hard at work doing exactly that: In 2009, a robot named the iCub made its debut at Manchester University in the United Kingdom and, much to the horror of mothers everywhere, it has the intelligence, learning ability, and movement capabilities of a three-year-old human child.

Does nobody remember “the terrible twos”? You know, that colloquialism referring to the ages of two to four, the ages when human children first become mobile, sentient, and unceasing little fleshy whirlwinds of destruction and pain? Well, now there’s a robot that does that, except it’s made out of steel and it will never grow out of it. The iCub can crawl, walk, articulate, recognize, and utilize objects like an infant. As anybody who owns nice things can attest, there is no exception to this rule: Infants can only recognize how to utilize and manipulate objects for the purposes of destruction. How long before military forces around the world attempt to harness the awesome destructive capability of an infant by strapping rocket launchers onto the things and unleashing them on rival battlefields to “play soldier”?

The iCub is being developed by an Italian group called the RobotCub Consortium, an elite team of engineers spanning multiple universities, who presumably share both a love of robotics and a hatred for humanity so intense that every waking moment is spent pursuing its destruction. And before you go thinking that the rigid programming written by the sterling professionals at the RobotCub Consortium will surely limit the iCub’s field of terror, you should know that the best part of this robot is that it’s open source! As John Gray, a professor of the Control Systems Group at Manchester, says:

Users and developers in all disciplines, from psychology, through to cognitive neuroscience, to developmental robotics, can use it and customize it freely. It is intended to become a research platform of choice, so that people can exploit it quickly and easily, share results, and benefit from the work of other users…It’s hoped the iCub will develop its cognitive capabilities in the same way as a child, progressively learning about its own bodily skills, how to interact with the world and eventually how to communicate with other individuals.

Let’s do a more thorough breakdown of that statement: The iCub can be customized for use in “cognitive neuroscience,” which, as all Hollywood movie plotlines will tell you, is basically legalese for “bizarre psychological torture.” The iCub is intended for people to “exploit it quickly and easily” and will hopefully develop “in the same ways as a child.” It will grow and learn like a human child, becoming more competent, more agile, and more intelligent. So… what would happen if you exploited a human child (you know, the thing this robot is patterned after) constantly, its entire life spent in a metaphorical Skinner box performing bizarre neuroscience experiments, all the while “learning” and “growing” from the experience?

• “It’s sentient, superstrong, made out of solid steel and gentlemen… it just missed nappy time.”

• “If I don’t come back just remember: I love you, Natasha, and the destruct sequence is ‘SpongeBob.’”

• “Osh-Kosh B’GODITHURTSSOBAD.”

That’s right: They’re building the world’s first insane robot. The world’s first insane robot… that looks, moves, and behaves like a human child . If you cast Stephen Baldwin as a Professor of Robonomics whose family was recently lost in a tragic arc-welding accident, and who is now humanity’s last best hope for survival, you’ve got the entire plot of a sci-fi horror movie right there. It’s like they’re basing their plans on villainy!

So if we combine all of this, what do we have? A robot that learns like a child, sucks energy from the power grid, and wants more than anything to survive. That’s damn well unstoppable, but at least we could bomb the entire power supply out of existence, and then hide in some caves until the childlike monstrosities all choke on some small parts or something, right? Robots need an artificial power supply, and this is really the only exploitable weakness left. Whether that energy is supplied through solar power, natural gas, or the electrical grid, it is ultimately artificial and therefore containable. Humans, animals, and plants can survive without these things. We can live off the land if need be, hunting for our sustenance and waiting for the electric plants to eventually die down, so that we won’t have to cower in the shadows any longer, haunted by the shrill electronic cries of the roaming cybertoddlers.