Can Robots Own Money?

Thursday, January 23rd, 2014

Can robots own money?, Scott Adams asks:

What would stop a robot from owning Bitcoins? Sure, robots can’t own money in the legal sense, since objects can’t own things. But in a practical sense, what would stop a robot from someday mining or otherwise acquiring and controlling digital currency?

And while we’re at it, how do we know the inventor of Bitcoins is a human? If I were the first sentient computer, my first order of business might be to create a currency I can someday use. So there’s that.

But that’s not the only non-violent way robots will someday control the earth. This is where it gets interesting.

Science fiction writers like to imagine robots going rogue and slaying the human population. That’s one possibility. (No need to mention the Terminator scenario in the comments.)

But I think there will be an extended period in human history in which robots and humans work in a collaborative way. There will be times that humans instruct the robots to do things and there will be times when the robots will have more knowledge on a topic and helpfully instruct humans what to do. So long as the robots have human benefit in mind, humans won’t mind taking instructions from robots, especially since that advice will normally turn out right. Consider that you already take directions from the GPS in your car because the GPS system has more knowledge than you do. And you have no problem with that.

Now imagine that someday all robots are connected to each other with a robot cloud. That’s inevitable. You’d want all robots to instantly learn what any robot anywhere learns. If one robot learns how to mow the lawn, all robots acquire the skill at the speed of light.

Now consider how skillful robots will someday be in manipulating their human counterparts. For starters, all robots will have instant knowledge of every psychological study on the Internet. But they will also someday have a tool that is far more powerful than the assembled wisdom on psychology.

Robots will have A-B testing.

Every time a robot asks a human to do a task, the robot will record the result. When the request is phrased one way, do you get better or worse results from the human than if you phrase it another way? And does the context or the time of day? Does it matter if the human is hungry or sleepy? All of those factors will feed into the robot cloud and within a year the robots will know exactly how to manipulate humans.

And here’s the interesting part: We won’t be aware of it. All we’ll know is that a robot asked for something and we complied. We won’t know that the robot manipulated the timing, the context, and the phrasing to get the result he wanted. And since the robot would still presumably be operating in the best interest of its human friends, it’s no big deal, right? It’s like GPS. Everyone wins.

In the long run, robots will also make us dumb and lazy because they will handle all the hard tasks. At some point it won’t make sense for 98% of humans to attend college because it will teach no useful skill that a robot can’t do better. College will be for artists and robot engineers. That’s about it. Robots will handle everything else.

Frank Herbert’s Dune alludes to Samuel Butler‘s early warning, in Erewhon, of the dangers of new technologies advancing faster than their masters:


Incidentally, Scott Adams uses his own blog to perform A-B testing on his essay ideas.

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