The battle between robots and humans has been every scientist’s dream no matter their field of specialty.

It has been a raging debate ever since technological advancements started being made and the issue was made more realistic by Hollywood in many science fiction movies. Great minds have joined in the discussion, including Stephen Hawking, who predicted machines would take over the world in the next 100 years to come.

This has been named the AI take over. Elon Musk also added his voice and urged research to be done on precautionary measures just in case such a scenario unfolded. The fears arose after Artificial Intelligence (AI), came into being. Machines, devices, and Robots started getting smarter and taking over a host of individual jobs and tasks.

Motivation

If we take the example of a machine, it is highly unlikely that on its own, it would think about taking over the world even in its super intelligent form. Unlike humans, machines do not have the emotional capacity to be so motivated as to take over the world for their own interest.

A man behind a machine taking over the world would be a more likely scenario. Machines are made to compliment humans and take on workloads that would have been strenuous for people, taken a lot of human resources or taken ages to accomplish.

Hawkins warning on robots

According to Stephen Hawkins, his fear of the AI take over stemmed from the fact that robots were getting smarter, stronger and bigger than human beings and they could take off on their own and re-design themselves at supersonic speeds. This, according to Hawkins would catch the human race unawares as we are slow in our evolution and we would not be able to compete with that scenario.

Elon Musk was blunter about it in an interview, “If I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is. It’s probably that…. With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the devil.”

Technological advances

It goes to some extent that machines can beat us in various tasks what we tend to forget is that there are attributes that an engineer cannot program into a computer; survival, nourishment, reproduction, adaptation and interacting with an unpredictable environment are a few examples.

With the direction machines are taking, they will always be better than us on some fronts and vice versa. The issue of a takeover is somehow far-fetched or a case of somebody watching too many movies.

Military robots

There may be a perception that these types of machines could be created by a crazy government to take over the world. Again, that is highly unlikely as computers and machines do not come cheap.

Besides, how many robots would one need to beat the world into submission? Each country has a lot of soldiers who are prepared to die for their countries, and even compensating their families in the unfortunate event of their deaths, would be much cheaper than putting robots out there.

Where we are headed will be more of a merger between humans and machines. It will reach a point where we will be unable to draw the line, as of now, machines are an extension of us.