Robogeddon
~noun : An event in future history where the end of the world comes about as a result of robots enslaving the human race.

see also : “Terminator 2 : Judgement day” , “I, Robot”, “A.I”, “Robots”

You know, some people ask me “Nick, how do you think the end of the world will come about?” At this point, I tell everyone to sit down and listen to this tale of woe and suffering.

My suspicions arose when I saw the movie “I, Robot”.
After watching it wanted to see how far robotic technology had come and to my surprise, it wasn’t too far off from what I saw in the movie.

look here to see what I mean :

now I am also an avid movie buff, so I was watching the making of Lord of the rings and the crowd simulator they developed for the film called “Massive”.
Check here to see what massive actually is :

Anyways the short explanation is that when they were designing Massive, you can actually program each individual “actor” to interact with other actors in the simulation. That is, if an actor from one army, came across an actor from and opposing army, they would start fighting. The problem was though, the way an actor recognised another actor in the simulation was through sight and would not turn around to fight someone even if an opponent was standing directly behind them. As such, the actors would soon deduce that no one was left to fight in their direct line of sight and would run off figuring they had finished fighting, when in reality there were hundreds of other opposing actors behind them waiting to be fought. The solution in the end was to give the actors ears so they could hear their opponents.

confused…
probably.

but the point is, the programmers had designed this thing to do a certain task, but had left out a fairly crucial subroutine that made the program do something… unpredictable.

Now bare with me…

I have heard it said that the next wave of modern appliances will ultimately be robotic which essentially means that everything from your fridge, washing machine and car will all be automated by a computer in one way or another. In fact in Japan, they have already deployed robots like Asimo in nursing homes to assist the elderly should they need immediate assistance when no one is around.

Thats great you say! no more folding clothes. no more walking the dog! no more doing the dishes! Hell people are developing robots to go to war for us!

It will be a glorious day! Cause lets face it, the more we lend ourselves to technology, the more we become dependent on them. And soon enough we will be allowing machines to make everyday decisions for us. When is the best time to exercise? What is the optimal time to get up? What should I wear today?!?!?

And in our every increasingly busy age of technology, our growing need for more convenient interaction, we will even be replacing humans with a computer companion! It wouldn’t surprise me if people started having defacto relationships with a computer program.
Twisted? heck yeah it is, but look at the link below and see if that aint one of the scariest things ever:

However! This is where it could all horribly awry.

We have these robots, in our house, doing our mundane chores and looking after us while we sleep, but as the movie “I, robot” suggested, there could conceivably one day, be a subroutine in a robot, that goes unchecked and unnoticed until a set of ill conceived circumstances lead to one of the first human robot-related fatalities.

and then Skynet goes online! But its ok Arnie will be sent back in time to save the day!

oh man don’t get me started about time travel…

Now of course this is all pure speculation and I have way more crack pot ideas about Robbogeddon which even involves the anti-christ! haha

Anyways that is my evidence, and perhaps you’ll think I’m crazy. But if you are my friend, you probably already knew that.

Peace!
and stay away from the robots!!
dun dun dun

Tags: AI, appliance, arnold, asimo, companion, computer, cybernetics, cyborg, end of the world, friendship, future, honda, japan, lonely, massive, robotics, robots, robots hate you, sony, terminator, toyota, war, xbox

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Rants, Robots hate you. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.