Commenter allworkandnoplay writes:
This is one of the worst articles I've ever read.
First, it's Steve Jobs' personal responsibility to make sure that your children don't treat others like slaves or whatever it is you think is happening here?
Second, I just love this bit: "That’s why Freud sat psychoanalysts behind their patients. It’s also why phone sex can be so intense." Freud? Really? Are you aware how incredibly debunked everything he ever did is? And phone sex? "So intense"? Freud and your personal speculation about phone sex are your appeals to authority?
We're nowhere near the point where AIs/robots/whatevers deserve any status other than "tool." When we are, I'm sure it'll be an interesting topic for discussion. In the mean time, try taking some responsibility for teaching your children right from wrong, and please for god's sake stop with the sensationalist headlines.
I will dispute that robots don't deserve any status other than "tool", because the literature clearly shows that they do currently exist in a space slightly higher than "tool" -- BUT, as Shulevitz conveniently neglects to mention, a space still very, very far removed from "intelligent, living, feeling agent": if you think current robotics is even 10% of the way there to enabling these doomsday scenarios, you'll be sorely disappointed the moment you step inside any robotics lab. Attitudes and ethics surrounding robots will evolve as time passes, and until then, it's too early for such sensationalist speculation.
"Friends don’t collect data on friends, wittingly or not" is bad enough of an appeal to emotion, but this is my personal favorite: "To the children, Robovie was “slave-like,” Kahn told me. Anyone who has read about life in slaveholding societies knows how coarsening it can be to grow up among others defined as almost but not quite equal."
Slavery was dehumanizing, yes - what's your point? Robots aren't going to be able to "grow up among others" as slaves; they have no humanity to be stripped away in the first place. This is an almost hilariously blatant attempt at using an irrelevant aside to evoke a strong negative emotion in the reader that, because humans are notoriously bad at understanding their feelings, will then be misattributed to the main discussion of robots. Almost hilarious, but not quite - because few (myself included) pick up on such tricks upon a quick read of such articles, and cursory skimming is all that most of us do these days.
Perhaps getting used to "slave-like" robot helpers will cause us all to become immoral bastards towards each other. Perhaps we'll actually understand that robots and humans are different things that can't be treated the same way. We don't know, and we shouldn't assume the worst.