The epic robot fails that say AI will never rule the world

Will the machines rise up and enslave us? The history of incompetent robots, from klutzy cleaners to sense-mangling chatbots, suggests we can sleep easy

Renaud Vigourt

By Douglas Heaven

WE ALL know how it ends: the machines rise up to enslave their puny masters. Robots and artificial intelligences may so far have confined themselves to blameless pursuits such as vacuum cleaning, beating us at board games and recommending products we might also like. But as they continue their inexorable rise, entering a “singularity” of runaway self-improvement, they will inevitably turn their attention to robopocalypse. Stephen Hawking says AI could spell the end for humanity. Elon Musk thinks it could lead to world war three. Vladimir Putin says whoever controls AI will control the world.

Maybe so. But as comic strip author Randall Munroe – himself formerly a roboticist – puts it in his book What If? Serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions: “What people don’t appreciate, when they picture Terminator-style automatons striding triumphantly across a mountain of human skulls, is how hard it is to keep your footing on something as unstable as a mountain of human skulls.”