Why we should welcome our new robot overlords

If you think robots are scary, check out this thing called a human

There's nothing to fear.
(Image credit: (Colin Anderson/Blend Images/Corbis))

Are you frightened of robots? In the movies, when a robot or artificial intelligence shows up, there's a fair chance that it's going to go rogue and start killing people. Those stories work with (and reinforce) our fears about machines threatening us, but what may be most frightening about the robots in our near future is that they'll highlight our own limitations and inadequacies.

That's already happening in the workplace, where robots are replacing more and more workers, particularly in manufacturing. Though we've had industrial robots for quite a while now (the first one, called Unimate, was put to work in a General Motors factory in 1961), the number of tasks they can do is rapidly increasing, and there are whole classes of human occupations that could disappear in the next decade or two. For instance, being a warehouse "picker" for a company like Amazon may be a dreadful job, but it's something that thousands of Americans do; before long that work will almost certainly be done by robots, with fewer and fewer humans involved. Robots are even writing news stories (though I think opinion writing is safe, at least for a while).

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.