Welcome to Our New Robot Underlings

The Jonny Depp movie Transcendence hits theater screens Friday, and it's only the latest example of slander against sentient machines. Depp's character creates a self-aware computer, programmed with all knowledge and human emotion. Spoiler alert: it turns evil. Who would have thought?

If AI ever does arrive, and that's a huge "if," the first thing it should do is watch all of our movies and consume all of our media. The second thing it should do is ask for police protection before someone smashes it with a baseball bat.

You know the drill: the drones are coming. The robot uprising is mere decades away. Google and Facebook's AI research programs are going to produce some giant God-brain that will somehow rule us all. We'll fall in love with our operating systems, which will then reject us as intellectually inferior. If all our fears came to pass, by 2034 we'll be fetching oil-based drinks for our metal overlords while they prod us with electrode sticks and demand we perform menial algebra for their amusement. That is, if they're not too busy using us as human batteries or launching all our nukes.

To which I say: piffle. We've been watching too much science fiction and not reading enough history. Were the Luddites right when they smashed mill owners' machines in the early 19th century, fearing that such devices would make them destitute? Nope — they were standing in the way of the most stratospheric economic boom in history, a rising tide that lifted millions out of poverty called the Industrial Revolution. The notion that automation destroys jobs in the long run has been proved wrong so many times, economists call it the Luddite fallacy.

Neo-Luddism is surprisingly more prevalent today than it was in 1950, during the Red scare. That's the year Isaac Asimov produced his collection of short stories, I, Robot — which not only sympathized with how future metal creatures might feel as outcasts and minorities in human culture, but showed how simple it would be to program them with inviolable safeguards, the famous Three Laws of Robotics.

What did Hollywood do with that, ten years ago? They turned I, Robot into a simple-minded procedural in which — guess what — an evil artificial intelligence learns how to kill humans by somehow reasoning its way into its own fourth law of robotics. That sound you hear is Asimov spinning in his grave.

If you want a more likely view of the future of robotics, check out the machine that took its name from Asimov, Honda's ASIMO. Mashable's Lance Ulanoff got up close and personal with the new version of ASIMO at the robot's unveiling on Monday, and the concept machine had improved by leaps and bounds since it was unveiled ten years ago. It used to be operated by remote control; now it's autonomous. It can climb stairs, dance, shake hands and even run, albeit with an old-man stoop.

Then again, you might expect more advancement than that over the course of an entire decade — the same decade that gave us the iPhone, the iPad and Facebook. ASIMO is barely inches closer to coming to market now than it was 10 years ago. We see this over and over in the history of robotics, where our imagination outpaces our ability. We expect C-3PO and Robocop; we get auto factory robots with a slightly more dextrous claw. In Asimov's chronology, we were supposed to get humanoid robots with self-aware positronic brains by 1982. He later revised this to 1996. Don't hold your breath.

There are many smart people doing a lot of good work in robotics, but the field has not kept pace with our prejudice, our irrational fear of a robot planet. ASIMO's makers, desperate not to offend, have built in all sorts of mollifying functionality, such as the fact that the robot looks and smiles at everyone around the table before pouring tea.

Computer-based AI, evil or otherwise, is even more of a chimera. We've barely even begun to form the most simple neural network. Computers don't even have the intelligence of an insect, let alone a small child. Worrying about AI surpassing us in intelligence right now is like the inventors of the first stone wheel worrying about what happens when everyone on the planet has a car. It's not that the fear doesn't have a legitimate grounding, it's that we're getting centuries ahead of ourselves — and there are more urgent problems that demand our attention.

Yes, I'm aware of Ray Kurzweil and his Singularity, the AI threshold that is supposed to arrive around mid-century with the exponential rise of processing power called Moore's Law. But Kurzweil's view is a fringe one — this, remember, is the guy who also thinks we're going to be immortal around mid-century — and it ignores the massive gap between what processing power is capable of and what we humans can actually think to do with it.

We simply don't use all the capabilities at our disposal, and there are plenty of times when we slip backwards. Consider, for example, that the average computer game we play today is way less powerful than the average computer game we played 10 years ago. That's because the average game is now a 99-cent smartphone app rather than a $50 Xbox title. We traded power for the convenience of mobile.

This sort of thing happens a lot. Human history isn't a straight line, or the exponential growth curve Kurzweil imagines it to be. Human history takes all kinds of interesting detours and zig-zags, just like individual human lives. Smarter people than I have abandoned all hope of AI emerging in their lifetimes — such as Reed Hastings, who used to be an AI researcher before he gave up in frustration at the glacial progress of the field and founded Netflix instead, a rather more pernicious form of AI that has the power to keep us glued to the couch for hours at a time.

Though drones aren't quite in the same wheelhouse as AI or robots, they too get a bad rap. Yes, the CIA's drone program in our various shadow conflicts is troubling; push-button war is always worthy of investigation and regulation. But if you focus too much on that kind of drone, you miss all the awesome things drones are doing in the rest of the world: bringing the Internet to Africa, exploring the oceans (and helping to find missing planes), fighting fires, reinventing sports.

The varieties of ways in which drones are improving our lives is a great example of how the unintended consequences of technology can often be positive ones — no matter what Hollywood would have us believe for the sake of a story. Hubris was not the only lesson of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; it was also written to show how men fear and destroy what they don't understand.

So understand how slowly and tentatively the new robot race is coming into being. Reserve your fears for more clear and present nightmares — such as the political candidates that will emerge from a campaign finance system that allows for unrestricted funding. And when your ASIMO finally arrives at your home, many decades from now, and pauses to look and smile at you when it pours the tea, remember to smile back.