The year is 2010. Planes are very big. They can take 1400 passengers… Passengers wait in departure boxes. Robots load the boxes and put them onto the plane… There is no pilot. There is no crew… Robots are flying the plane…
This was part of an article on the future of flights written for an English course in the early 90′s. The pictures, as far as I can remember, included metal-faced humanoid robots doing the jobs of the crew. This, of course, looks rather ridiculous today. But if you look back at the beginning of the modern computer era, you will see such dream-like expectations all over the place. Computers taking over the world and apocalyptic wars being waged on human beings are elements of many sci-fi movies. Yet I can tell you, confidently, that no such thing is about to happen in at least half a century.
As a researcher in the field, there is an interesting question for me when it comes to the dreamland of super-human machine intelligence. Why aren’t we there yet? Was it literally unachivable, by the 2010 deadline, to build humanoids to replace a crew?
While there are many reasons as to why we failed to achieve such expectations, I would like to talk about the less obvious, and possibly the most influential reason. It was not economically justified. It is also not economically sound to build an army of deadly flying robots with a central AI control that might some day turn against human beings. It is as it is for now. Maybe someday one would spend a million dollars to replace a flight attendant that would cost a fraction of that over the lifetime of a robot. By that time the oil prices are high enough to prevent most of us from experiences the trill of such flights.
I am not, in anyway, suggesting that we have developed the level of intelligence needed for tasks like taking over the world. What I’m suggesting, instead, is that we did not move in that direction because the money was going in another way. Auto pilots, for instance, are way better substitutions for pilots than humanoids sitting in front of flight controls. Robots are appearing these days as clean and well-behaved replacements for pets rather than machines to carry “departure boxes”. Cheap labor, of course, would take care of that now. As for the plane, the latest Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” (to be in commercial use in 2010) is designed for fuel efficiency and not for thousands of passengers.
It seems rather sad to think of science as yet another product of the economy. But in today’s world everything is more or less governed by the money. The flow of science and its direction is no exception. So for you reading this, I can assure you that unless some crazily rich mad-man or government is going to sponsor a “terminator” project, no such thing is going to be built. And if you are a crazily rich mad-man, please don’t do it, and also give me some money.
Let me finish this by quoting the ending of the childish article on the future of flights:
[A robot:] It’s captain speaking. We are expecting to land soon. Sit back and relax. Nothing can go wrong, grr, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, …
