A Reddit Exchange

(The following was written without the use of ChatGPT, etc.)

I posted a message regarding this petition in a ‘pro robot’ Reddit feed – it was my first attempt to share directly to people who outright disagree with the concern of humanoid robots. Specifically, a feed contributor had expressed his frustration with a growing ‘robot uprising’ fear among those who generally know nothing about the technical nature of robots. It was to his sentiment here that I responded. This was what I shared:

 “Hi -- I guess I'm an example of the irritating type of person you're talking about. For the last several months, I've been promoting my petition to STOP Elon Musk (Tesla and Other Companies) from mass producing humanoid robots. Worst still, I'm not even a robotics hobbyist -- I work in the nonprofit, 'community engagement' sector.

While I agree there's a great deal of hysteria (and potential for hysteria) about a 'robot uprising,' I think there are numerous, technically valid concerns about the 'robot project.'

The challenges are similar to the ones we face with nuclear weaponry -- namely that the difficulty involved in the creation of an advanced robot (or technology) is not only totally incomparable to the difficulty of fostering a culture that can properly tolerate that advanced robot (or technology), BUT that the failure to foster said culture might somehow result in our catastrophic mishandling of the advanced robot (technology).

We can probably be sure that a small team of capable, passionate, and well financed people can more or less reliably create anything (within reason), we can't apply that same success 'formula' to the creation of culture. Culture requires not only the insights of people with brilliant 'fame-worthy' minds, but also the sort of folksy wisdom that emerges from innumerable people as they collectively negotiate various social and environmental obstacles over centuries -- if not millennia.

If anything, it's peculiar to me why technologists would be so apparently uninterested in the broader, social context in which their machines will (or won't) operate.”

My sentiment was, unsurprisingly, not a popular one.