It's not killer robots I'm scared of - it's the ones making us all lazy and stupid

A recent report claims that a £350 Irobot Roomba 760, which can clean, vacuum and polish, decided to burn itself to death on a kitchen hotplate

The world’s first robot suicide has been reported. A story from Austria last week purported to tell how a robot tasked with cleaning a family home was so fed up with its monotonous life that it ‘committed suicide’.
The £350 Irobot Roomba 760, which can clean, vacuum and polish, is said to have decided to burn itself to death on a kitchen hotplate. Its owner Gernot Hackl said: ‘It has ruined my home. I intend to sue for compensation.’
A tale of our times, encompassing the compensation culture and a world in which machines have increasingly taken over the most fundamental tasks which were once the duty of humans.
In reality, the Irobot Roomba 760 did not decide to kill itself. Its apparently spontaneous gravitation on to Mr Hackl’s hotplate was not an act of will. Some robots, however, do seem almost human.
Last year, in Tokyo, I was introduced to the latest version of Asimo, which its creator, Honda, describes as a ‘humanoid robot with the world’s first autonomous behaviour control technology’. 
Asimo moved in such a fluid and, yes, human fashion that I forgot I was engaging with a machine.
The Japanese, with an increasingly aged population but a resolute refusal to license mass immigration, have turned to robots as the only means of maintaining labour output.
Of course, if it were true, as some believe, that the most advanced robots are actually ‘thinking’, then it might be illegal under international law to treat them as we do. 
Irobot Roomba 760 and Asimo could then be defined as slaves — bought and sold into drudgery.
Fortunately, this is not the case.
There are, however, genuine moral and legal problems as a result of remarkable recent developments in robotics and computing.
Last week, a UN committee comprising delegates from 117 nations met to discuss the use of ‘fully autonomous weapons’. This is a step beyond drones, which America is already using to assassinate her enemies: those machines are directed at all times by humans, albeit thousands of miles away.
The coming generation of so-called ‘robot killers’ — such as the U.S. firm Raytheon’s Phalanx Close-In Weapon System — can act without immediate direction by humans.
So who, the UN delegates debated, could be legally held responsible if the autonomous ‘kill assessment’ of this remarkable piece of hardware erroneously targeted an ambulance rather than a tank? The white-coated boffin who originally programmed it? 
Enthusiasts for ‘killer robots’ insist that their development and widespread use would reduce the incidence of wrongdoing perpetrated by military flesh and blood. 
The fighting robots would not be emotionally scarred by conflict and, therefore, would not do what Marine A was found guilty of by a British court a fortnight ago — killing a helpless and wounded prisoner out of some sort of instinct for revenge for the deaths of his colleagues.

The Japanese, with an increasingly aged population but a resolute refusal to license mass immigration, have turned to robots as the only means of maintaining labour output (Honda creation Asimo pictured)

These are all possible developments at the cutting edge of defence technology, far removed from our everyday domestic lives. 
Yet it is in the latter that advances in computing have made the biggest impact on human society — and which pose moral and behavioural questions entirely ignored by the UN.
The march of the machines has given us unprecedented amounts of free time. That is liberating and wonderful if we use it well. 
People might watch Downton Abbey and marvel at the number of servants employed by a single wealthy family, but machines such as microwaves and dishwashers have given countless of millions the sort of freedom from drudgery that was once the preserve only of those who could afford staff.
Yet while it is no bad thing to be spared the physical effort of menial tasks, I’m not sure the same conclusion can be reached when it is mental effort that has been made redundant. 

The coming generation of so-called 'robot killers' - such as the U.S. firm Raytheon's Phalanx Close-In Weapon System - can act without immediate direction by humans

I am of the last generation that learned mathematics before the arrival of that most basic of computers, the pocket calculator. So, though I have no particular ability at maths, I am competent at mental arithmetic. This does not on the whole seem to be true of my children’s generation.
It will be argued that they don’t need this  skill in the computer age. But it is only  by doing calculations in your head that you can truly feel numbers — or so I insist on believing.
I am just as guilty of laziness, however, when it comes to route-finding. Gone are the days when I would study maps before setting out on a journey to somewhere new. 
Nowadays I rely on the satellite navigation system and drive oblivious to direction, my attention diverted by some pleasing music on the car sound system.
A few weeks ago, I got my come-uppance when the satnav suddenly went on the blink mid-journey. I came close to panic, having little idea of where I was, let alone how to get to where I wanted. 
At least I had a functioning mobile phone and was able to pull in and call my wife to ask her to look up my journey on the British road atlas, which we still fortunately possess. This only emphasised how much less self-reliant we have become.
It was back in 1997 that computers made a tremendous symbolic leap when the chess machine known as Deep Blue beat the world’s strongest carbon-based life-form, Gary Kasparov, in a match. 
Yet that IBM machine cost millions of dollars and needed an entire room to house all its component parts.
Today, for £5.99, you can buy an iPhone application of the world software chess champion, HIARCS (which stands for Higher Intelligence Auto Response Chess System) — and it is far  more powerful than Deep Blue, not to mention any human.
I like and admire Mark Uniacke, the English computer programmer who has developed HIARCS. But I couldn’t help telling him how one result of his remarkable software is that it has made me and many other chess fans intellectually lazy.
Where once we would think hard and on our own when analysing games at home, now we just sit back and feed the moves into his programme, which instantly spews out all the answers. 
In other words, it makes us mentally soft, the intellectual equivalent of the generation of fatsos who barely need to walk or lift a muscle because machines have all but removed the need to do either.
So beware robots, I say. They are marvels that could turn us all into physical and mental slobs.

 

The weather killed JFK

In the week marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, the airwaves are full of the usual conspiracy theories.
Just as many could not accept the banal truth that Diana Princess of Wales died because she had not put on her seatbelt (and, of course, because the driver was drunk), so millions can’t believe JFK’s death was the unassisted action of a single attention-seeking loner. Pure chance is always underestimated.
On last week’s ITV documentary The Day Kennedy Died, Jacqueline Kennedy’s secret service agent, Clint Hill, recalled that had the day been rainy the First Couple would not have been driven through Dallas in an open-top limousine — and they would also have had the roof on if it had been windy, in order to avoid making a mess of Jackie’s hair.

 

I have become wearily accustomed to the frequency of delays on the Hastings line, run by Southeastern Railways. But on the last day of September, they came up with a novel way of infuriating this customer. As I walked towards a waiting train at Stonegate, it pulled out — almost two minutes before its scheduled departure time. This is a station where departures to London, outside rush hours, are a full hour apart.
So I filled out a customer complaint form and handed it in at Southeastern’s information desk at London’s Charing Cross station.
I heard nothing back.
Eventually, I called the company’s customer relations department — who did well at sounding concerned.
By October 30, I received an email: ‘Please accept my apologies for the difficulties you were caused.’
No suggestion of recompense.
Further correspondence took place and last week I was informed that I could apply for the return of my fare, but: ‘You’ll need to make your claim within 28 days of travel.’
Of course, it was now a month and a half after the day of travel, and so I was ineligible for a refund.
You have to admire the company’s ingenuity, if not their time-keeping.