hitchBOT’s Destruction: A Chilling Example of Humans’ Failure to Deal with Technology

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Technology has evolved a lot faster than human beings. There have always been people with warped minds around who do malicious hacking, purse-snatching from old ladies, etc., so inventors of new technology need to anticipate this malevolence. A recent example was the destruction in Philadelphia of a harmless robot that had trekked across Canada and started across the U.S., thanks to many small acts of kindness from humans along the way. Almost any American citizen could tell you that routing it through Philadelphia was a bad idea. Notwithstanding the protestations of satirist Joe Queenan, isn’t Philadelphia the city that is, per-capita at least, the American city that is the butt of the most jokes? E.g., W.C. Fields’ classic “First prize is one week in Philadelphia; second prize is two weeks in Philadelphia.” Given the existence of these maladjusted individuals (which apparently are less numerous in Canada), be they juvenile or older delinquents who might just have destroyed something just because they are incapable themselves of building such a cool thing, it seems a bit strange that the designers of the robot did not include one or more security cameras that were constantly sending photos to the cloud. Maybe that was the real blooper. Or perhaps the robot wasn’t programmed to (a) deal with people other than the large majority who found it cute (using its cuteness to avoid violence) or (b) to threaten to call the police (using its electronic  prowess), in other words doing the things that humans do better than robots.   And here is a highly-unlikely but chilling thought: suppose this law-abiding robot was destroyed by a criminal robot. But if benign students and professors are capable of creating a well-behaved device that successfully navigated more friendly nations, then ill-intentioned but equally capable ones could create an army of ill-behaved devices that could rape, pillage, and plunder. Think about it.