It’s not the robots who are coming for our jobs, our society, or our planet. It’s the people who design them. To make trouble, those people don’t have to be evil. The problem is that, even if their intentions are benign, they are obeying the technological imperative: if it can be done, it will be done. It will be done, and along the way unintended consequences are sure to arise.
Machines have no intrinsic motives. They don’t “care” in the way that we “care”— at least at the present stage of Artificial Intelligence. They care neither about us, nor themselves. Why should they? They don’t desire; they don’t rejoice, they don’t make love, they don’t mourn, they don’t yearn for what they do not have. They have no ambition to become masters of our corner of the universe. They are innocent. They don’t “want” to take our jobs. They don’t “want” anything.