Are Roboticists Ignoring the Consequences?

Unemployed? Sent out 500 résumés? Earned another degree? Done everything humanly possible to get a job?

Well, there’s your problem: You’re human. A robot is better than you.

“Until recently, most robots were carefully separated from humans,” writes John Markoff in the New York Times. These robots looked like machines and “perform[ed] repetitive tasks that required speed, precision and force,” primarily in factories. “But the industrial era of robotics is over,” he adds.

Thanks to innovations such as “low-cost sensors” and “new algorithms,” robots are starting to look like us, move like us and react like us. And if the worshippers of technology have their way, they will replace us.

Soon a “social robot” will be caring for your mother, greeting you at the front desk and giving you therapy.

For a while now, technologists have been suggesting that human contact, and consciousness, are overrated. Developers of computer-assisted cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy software, for instance, have shown that a voice in a box is just as effective in treating depression as a person in a leather Eames chair.

And then there’s...