by Patrick Appel
Randall Munroe, who worked on robots for NASA, predicts that "the robot revolution would end quickly" because robots "never, ever work right":
Those robots lucky enough to have limbs that can operate a doorknob, or to have the door left open for them, would have to contend with deceptively tricky rubber thresholds before they could get into the hallway. Hours later, most of them would be found in nearby bathrooms, trying desperately to exterminate what they have identified as a human overlord but is actually a paper towel dispenser.
One of Alex Knapp's commenters disagrees about the robot threat:
Randall is right that robots can cause only limited damage to humans. The best thing by far to cause damage to a human is another human. And machines can easily arrange that.
For starters, almost all food for humans depends entirely on machinery to plough, cultivate, irrigate etc. Stop that for a short time and humans would be unable to survive in the numbers we do – we would have to kill each other to obtain food. Our society also depends on other infrastructure – gas, electricity, petrol. Stop those and riots begin in short order.
But probably the most important thing is money. Everybody’s money is nowadays held by machine. If the machines just set that to zero, there would be no way for us to operate the interactions which keep our society going.
The Dish 