It’s hard to turn on the television nowadays without being shown a robot. It might be looking like a grasshopper doing something terribly important, such as helping a surgeon with an operation, or just be a cute little metal humanoid designed to make schoolchildren more interested in their studies. One robot I saw on TV the other day was disguised as a cuddly white seal pup that was feigning pleasure at being stroked on a woman’s lap in an old people’s home. It seemed to make her happy without biting or scratching or doing any of the other unpleasant things that live animals are prone to.
Robots clearly have their uses, then. But why is so much airtime now devoted to them? It seems to be the fault of Professor Stephen Hawking who, at the beginning of the year, sounded a fearsome alarm. ‘The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,’ he said.
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