Why I am not afraid of nowadays technologies

Are you afraid of this movie from Boston Dynamics?

Well…I immediatelly imagined those beasts sneaking into my bedroom in the middle of the night. Pretty frightening, right? Especially the one with clamp arm which looks like head of snake. Plus the feeling they are super intelligent but lacking emotions and mercy. It is even more frightening to play it without audio. They aren’t sillent killers but they do funny sounds which warns you in advance - and that decrease impression of them 😀

But besides silly sounds there are other reasons why they are harmless - in some sense. I will try to persuade you all similar technologies are just another tools we made. That means they are useless without human operator and caretaker. They still may be lethal but in the same sense as battle tank, Predator drone or gun. Without operator they are just useless chunks of iron. Without care taker it would break, get out of energy and go rusty sooner or later.

I bet that behavior of those beasts in movie above is just scripted by large group of software engineers. And if door opens to the opposite side it would fail. Or if there would be different shape of door handle. State of the Deep learning hype can be seen on this movie:

Peoplekind is great in improving technologies during whole history. Current progress is nothing new. Machines may do autonomously more activities than previous generations. For example aim automatically or drive on straight highway. But we aren’t on the level they can operate autonomously. When appears situation they are not programmed for or trained by tremendous amount of test inputs, they are helpless. If armed by weapons, sooner or later they would kill even creator. And, on the other hand, any human could beat them:

All machines we have ever built - planes, trains, hammers, computers, self-driving cars etc. - have the same weakness. They aren’t alive. They lack that vital power that urges us to live and reproduce. They need us to command them, build them, improve them, fix them and feed them with energy. Their meaning of life is to serve us. There is no reason for their existence except beeing useful for us.

There are no working solutions for Artificial general inteligence, self repairing, reproduction, self improving, autonomously gaining resources, … Compare that with simplest possible living organisms like bacteria. Until we will be able to master technology of make alive/vital/self-sustainable machines I believe there is no danger. And that all won’t happen any time soon.