Reverse Robotics: A Brief Thought Experiment

Imagine a world in which manually controlled technologies simply do not exist. The very thought of manual technologies is, in actual fact, hardly conceivable let alone comprehensible. Instead, this seemingly alien world is seamlessly powered by intelligent and autonomous robotics systems. Lets call this world Planet AI.

Planet AI’s version of airplanes, cars, trains and ships are completely unmanned. That is, they are fully autonomous—a silent symphony of large and small robots waltzing around with no conductor in sight. On one fateful night, a young PhD student awakens in a sweat unable to breathe, momentarily. The nightmare: all the swirling robots of Planet AI were no longer autonomous. Each of them had to be told exactly what to do by the Planet’s inhabitants. Madness.

She couldn’t go back to sleep. The thought of having to tell her robotics transport unit (RTU) in the morning how to get from her studio to the university gave her a panic attack. She would inevitably get lost or worse yet crash, maybe even hurt someone. She’d need weeks of practice to manually control her RTU. And even if she could somehow master manual steering, she wouldn’t be able to steer and work on her dissertation at the same time during the 36-minute drive. What’s more, that drive would easily become a 100-minute drive since there’s no way she would manually steer the RTU at 100 kilometers an hour—the standard autonomous speed of RTUs; more like 30km/h.

And what about the other eight billion inhabits of Planet AI? The thought of having billions of manually controlled RTUs flying, driving & swimming through the massive metropolis of New AI was surely the ultimate horror story. Indeed, civilization would inevitably come to an end. Millions would die in horrific RTU collisions. Transportation would slow to a crawl before collapsing. And the many billions of hours spent working, resting or playing in automated RTU’s every day would quickly evaporate into billions of hours of total stress and anxiety. The Planet’s Global GDP would free fall. RTU’s carrying essential cargo automatically from one side of the planet to the other would need to be steered manually. Where would those millions of jobs require such extensive manual labor come from? Who in their right mind would even want to take such a dangerous and dull assignment? Who would provide the training and certification? And who in the world would be able to pay for all the salaries anyway?

At this point, the PhD student was on her feet. “Call RTU,” she instructed her personal AI assistant. An RTU swung by while she as putting on her shoes on. Good, so far so good, she told herself. She got in slowly and carefully, studying the RTU’s behavior suspiciously. No, she thought to herself, nothing out of the ordinary here either. It was just a bad dream. The RTU’s soft purring power source put her at ease, she had always enjoyed the RTU’s calming sound. For the first time since she awoke from her horrible nightmare, she started to breathe more easily. She took an extra deep and long breath.

The RTU was already waltzing with ease at 100km per hour through the metropolis, the speed barely noticeable from inside the cocoon. Forty-six, forty-seven and forty-eight; she was counting the number of other RTU’s that were speeding right alongside her’s, below and above as well. She arrived on campus in 35 minutes and 48 seconds—exactly the time it had taken the RTU during her 372 earlier rides. She breathed a deep sigh of relief and said “Home Please.” It was just past 3am and she definitely needed more sleep.

She thought of her fiancée on the way home. What would she think about her crazy nightmare given her work in the humanitarian space? Oh no. Her heart began to race again. Just imagine the impact that manually steered RTUs would have on humanitarian efforts. Talk about a total horror story. Life-saving aid, essential medicines, food, water, shelter; each of these would have to be trans-ported manually to disaster-affected communities. The logistics would be near impossible to manage manually. Everything would grind and collapse to a halt. Damage assessments would have to be carried manually as well, by somehow steering hundreds of robotics data units (RDU’s) to collect data on affected areas. Goodness, it would take days if not weeks to assess disaster damage. Those in need would be left stranded. “Call Fiancée,” she instructed, shivering at the thought of her fiancée having to carry out her important life-saving relief work entirely manually.

The point of this story and thought experiment? While some on Planet Earth may find the notion of autonomous robotics system insane and worry about accidents, it is worth noting that a future world like Planet AI would feel exactly the same way with respect to our manually controlled technologies. Over 80% of airplane accidents are due to human pilot error and 90% of car accidents are the result of human driver error. Our PhD student on Planet AI would describe our use of manually controlled technologies a suicidal, not to mention a massive waste of precious human time.

An average person in the US spends 101 minutes per day driving (which totals to more than 4 years in their life time). There are 214 million licensed car drivers in the US. This means that over 360 million hours of human time in the US alone is spent manually steering a car from point A to point B every day. This results in more than 30,000 people killed per year. And again, that’s just for the US. There are over 1 billion manually controlled motor vehicles on Earth. Imagine what we could achieve with an additional billion hours every day if we had Planet AI’s autonomous systems to free up this massive cognitive surplus. And lets not forget the devastating environmental impact of individually-owned, manually controlled vehicles.

If you had the choice, would you prefer to live on Earth or on Planet AI if everything else were held equal?