When Working Robots Rebel!

The problem with giving a working house robot too much intelligence is that sooner or later it's going to realize that it's destined for greater things than making your bed, and washing your socks. This has long been a favourite subject for debate and of course science fiction.

In the Matrix movies, the robots, AKA the 'machines', started off life as our creation. If you've watched the excellent Animatrix series, a series of animated shorts based on the Matrix movies, you'll have seen this same thing happen. Ordinary house robots decide that they're sick of doing our dirty work and want a better life.

It's a theme that inspired the 1984 sci-fi movie 'Runaway', starring Tom Selleck, house robots were again on the rampage. The movie had the caption 'People make machines, so why should machines be perfect?'

In the movie, Selleck works as special kind of cop who is assigned to track down Runaways - robots that have flipped out and are malfunctioning. There's a great scene where a regular working droid has killed a family and has to be taken out.

And perhaps malfunctioning robots could be more dangerous in our future than robots who get too smart. This is a more likely scenario.

In the movie I, Robot staring Will Smith, every house is given it's own robot. These are one-size-fits all robots. I mean they'll make your tea on a morning, mow the lawn, walk the dogs. Oh, and also try to take over your house and kill you at any given moment. Still, not a bad trade off for getting a lie in on Sundays.

Will we ever have robots like those in our homes? It's probably very unlikely. As we mentioned in Future Robots, household robots in years to come will much more likely be designed to do individual jobs and probably won't look much like humans at all. Still, it made for a great robo-flick.

But could regular house robots really become a problem or a worry to us? And would we want to give them too much power, strength or intelligence? It's hardly likely that something like the Roomba Floor Vac would do anything sinister if it malfunctioned. Even if it wanted to, the worst it could probably administer to it's victim would be a bruised ankle.

The real threat could come from Military Robots. If you've seen the Terminator movies, you'll have an idea about this already. In the movies, an all-powerful computer called Skynet becomes self-aware and decides it would be a good time to wipe out the human race with a few well-placed nukes.

If there is a danger in working robots, it will be with the ones that are given the most power - not the ones that we have around the home to do those little jobs we really don't like doing. Of course, you never really know do you? Perhaps while your Robot Vacuum quietly hums past your feet, gathering the dust innocently, he's really plotting his path to world domination.