Could robots take over the world? - St. Petersburg Times

Could robots take over the world? - St. Petersburg Times: "It feels a bit like the End Times these days, what with assault rifles flying off the shelves and the markets swinging and the honeybees dying and the national deficit growing and the polar ice caps melting and wars raging and the missionaries from the panhandle cults filling our mailboxes with doomsday lit. The beast may be coming, and we wonder if we'll recognize it.

And all this at a time when we're weak. We're complacent. Few of us have ever gone hungry. Wars play out too far away for us to hear any actual gunfire. Hardly anyone really works anymore, except maybe chimney sweeps (seasonal) and plumbers. We have mastered the art of pretending to work, of minimizing windows when we hear the swoosh of footsteps outside the cubicle.

That's why the coming robot takeover is so scary.

• • •

A peek into the future:

Within the next few years, we predict there will be a catastrophic incident brought about by a computer system making a decision independent of human oversight.

Science fiction?

The prediction comes in a new book, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong, by Wendell Wallach, a consultant and writer in Yale's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and Colin Allen, professor of cognitive science and history and philosophy of science at Indiana University."