Humans vs. Robots

I am still haunted by the image of Melania Trump walking side-by-side with a humanoid robot down a red-carpeted hallway in the White House. After the robot introduced herself, Melania went on to tell her audience that in the future children’s learning would expand when every child in every classroom had a personal humanoid robot.

I’m a human developmentalist which means I have studied how we become people—how we acquire the ability to walk, talk, interact, bond, learn, create, procreate, and enjoin with our fellow earthly citizens. Becoming a successful human is a physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, and social process. It takes experiences with other humans to make that journey.

A robot is merely a mechanical construction that simulates being human. Robots can sound like they have feelings, but they don’t. Robots can sound like they have thoughts, but they don’t. Robots can make you think that they love you, but they don’t. Robots are machines that run on artificial intelligence. Instead of AI through a screen, we get AI in a mobile hunk of plastic and wires.

We saw what happens with screens. They become substitutes for talking to each other, reading books, looking at people around us, and paying attention to the world. Screens destroy our attention, focus, concentration, ability to think, our social skills, and our connections to each other. They turn us into jellyfish. (I hope I’m not insulting jellyfish.)

A robot is nothing more than AI packaged in a plastic humanoid costume. If screens have taken us half way down the black hole, robots will finish us off.

AI may be great at helping you plan a vacation, but when AI becomes a robot and can make a human think that the robot is human, we are history.