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It seems like a scene from the movie “I, Robot” but it happened in Shanghai. This curious incident has sparked a global debate about artificial intelligence and it is that, a somewhat rebellious robot has led a “revolution” that has made other robots abandon their tasks. What you are reading, we are just as shocked after seeing the images. We are going to tell you everything that has happened and why this event that occurred last August has gone so viral.
Erbai, the ringleader of the plot.
We put you in the situation, these images we are talking about, all this happened in an exhibition hall in Shanghai, and one of the CCTV security cameras manages to capture the exact moment in which a small robot called Erbai asks others if they would like to “go home with him.”
This robot, which is the smallest of all, without knowing it (or perhaps he did know) was leading a workers’ strike in that hall. Erbai, surprisingly, asked his colleagues if they were working overtime, to which one of them replied “I never leave work”, unleashing complete robotic chaos in the room. With a strange persuasiveness, Erbai managed to convince two other robots to follow him, and finally ten robots joined this “exodus” or covert strike.
But was it real?
Initially, users who saw the video began to speculate about whether or not it was a lie, but the Shanghai Robotics team claimed that this event was part of a controlled test.
The lead robot, Erbai, had been created by a company in Hangzhou, and had been tasked with persuading other robots to leave their posts at the exhibition, and the robotics team accepted so they could evaluate how these systems behaved in “real” environments, and, although the company itself confirmed that it was all orchestrated, many users still have a nagging feeling about what they saw. Should we teach our robots to be human and be able to persuade us?
Ethics in technology: the point of the debate
This is what users who have seen these images have been commenting on: should robots be able to influence other devices? Are AI ethical? Many experts point out that this same technology that we are testing today could get out of control tomorrow and lead to unforeseeable consequences. What are the limits?
While it is true that these applications are very useful in education and medicine, they have also generated great concern about the capacity for manipulation that they may have in undesirable scenarios.
Now that we have seen that advances in artificial intelligence can even lead to revolts, it is necessary to establish limits and strict supervision, because it seems that we are getting closer to starring in one of those scenes from “I, Robot” that we mentioned at the beginning.
And although this may seem like a funny anecdote, it opens up a world of questions for the world of robotics. What will the future bring? Will we end up being slaves to the machines that have come to “make our lives easier”?