• Question: Do you fear that one day all your jobs will be taken over by robots which are better at the job and work for free? Also if this is the case do you fear that the world will turn into some kind of terminator universe and humanity will be enslaved by machines?

    Asked by drkingschultz to Debbie, Glyn, Jon, Kat, Nicola on 8 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Glyn Barrett

      Glyn Barrett answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      It is certainly something which I have thought about! Robots are everywhere and they are really efficient at their jobs but robots are really designed to only do one or possibly two things and they do that repetitively and nothing else. Robots always need a human controller to program it and fix it when things go wrong or to supply it with power.
      I use a lot of robots in my laboratory as they are very precise but they wouldn’t be able to design my experiments or plan the next move.
      I think robots will become more multipurpose and important in future developments and some scientists are putting organic neurons into machines which gives them a sort of intelligence but we are still a long way off from self thinking robots.
      And anyways if machines did become independent there is no reason they would be aggressive and enslave humanity. They might be really friendly robots and want to help save the planet

    • Photo: Jonathan Stone

      Jonathan Stone answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      Interesting question…I can’t say I have worried about this much…but maybe I should! What would be really cool is if we could get robots to do the dangerous bits of work on volcanoes. Some people have tried this already…but it hasn’t worked that well yet…!

    • Photo: Kathryn McMahon

      Kathryn McMahon answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      Well, considering the amount of time I have to spend emailing, I think I’m already enslaved by machines!
      We do use a lot of robots in the lab (although more machines, rather than robots, I suppose). I don’t feel threatened by them for two reasons however:
      1. They are very expensive. You could pay me for over 8 years for the cost of our 3D microscope. Scientists are currently much cheaper.
      2. They break down a lot and we have to fix them. They’d be pretty stuck without their human helpers!

    • Photo: Debbie Crockard

      Debbie Crockard answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      Interesting question and actually when doing deep sea research robots are extremely important as they do work that we just can’t do as humans.

      When doing work in the deep sea we use robots known as ROVs or Remotely Operated Vehicles, these ROV’s are really big about the size of a small van and are very sophisticated, they can go down to depths that we can’t reach and are controlled by a specially trained team on the boat. The ROV can explore completely unknown regions that no one has ever seen, as well as take samples, take pictures and run experiments.

      Another great example of robots being used to do science can be found here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18062235 this link takes you to some information on ROBOfish. Robofish is a robot designed to complete real time pollution monitoring in harbours and is a pretty cool big yellow robot fish which can be programmed to swim and collect data on its own.

      I’m not to worried about these robots taking over my job completely as they cost way to much money (an ROV will cost you about £6million)- I’m much cheaper to run! But I think the opportunities are endless and there is definitely much more we could do with robots in the future particularly when exploring places that humans can’t survive.

    • Photo: Nicola Fletcher

      Nicola Fletcher answered on 11 Mar 2013:

      Good question! I think that it would be difficult for robots to do our jobs, since they would have to be able to think of ways to do experiments and then understand what they mean. But I remember in my last job, one of the people in the lab tested animals’ blood to find out why they were sick, and then he got a machine to do it for him. He still had to work in the lab though, putting the samples in the machine and also sending the results to the vets that were treating the animals.

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