Parenthood Has Made Me Detest Robots
You can’t throw a pacifier in American discourse without hitting someone talking about how having kids changed them. From Pete Buttigieg to Sarah Palin to the legions of guys who had daughters and realized sexual harassment is bad, many people apparently receive wisdom from parenthood they weren’t getting any other way.
This “as a parent…” talk can sound smug—which is weird, given that these moral revelations come from the humbling experience of having your ass handed to you daily by a creature the size of a marmot. I never thought I would be one of those people. But it’s true, parenthood has changed me in at least one way: I hate robots even more than I did before.
Last week, the internet lit up with giggles as one of Russia’s first humanoid robots was presented in Moscow, marching tentatively onstage to the Rocky theme song, only to face-plant and be hauled off by embarrassed handlers. The video made the rounds, even appearing on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
I can’t laugh at this stuff. Instead, it enrages me.
Humanoid robots are the perfect symbol for the suicidal absurdity of the AI frenzy. What is the point of making a robot walk like a human—like a toddler for now, but eventually a grown adult? According to robotics industry publications, it’s so they can replace humans more easily. To borrow Nvidia’s creepy phrasing, “Our world is built for humans by humans.” So making a robot look like a human makes it easier to appropriate that world—sorry, “collaborate” with humans, as Nvidia puts it. Those metal toddlers want your job, particularly if you work in manufacturing.
Scratch that. The companies making these metal toddlers want all of our jobs. As Colbert noted, immediately after laughing at the downed robot, the top country song by digital sales last week was written by AI. Social media companies, meanwhile, think they’ve figured out a particularly good way to monetize this technology: AI-generated ads to sell you more stuff.
As Ketan Joshi recently wrote at TNR, “Meta’s push to force-feed advertising slop into every single corner of the massive digital space it controls could not have worse timing.” Despite the company’s stated intent to purchase “renewable energy certificates,” the projected energy needed to power generative AI is breathing new life into the gas and even the coal industry. It’s also pushing our electricity bills higher and higher.
Say any of this to a member of the AI cult, and you’ll inevitably hear something about how AI is going to help humans, not hurt them. It will save lives, they say, pointing to algorithms’ ability to process reams of medical data quickly. Or you get some kind of reheated West Wing monologue about how lots of lifesaving technologies were accidental by-products of other scientific inquiry, so “discovery” is inherently good.
This is the same logical fallacy deployed by the plastics industry, which argues against policies discouraging single-use plastic packaging by pointing to artificial heart valves. While that may sound convincing, it’s important to remember that these two things are not mutually exclusive—it’s like saying policies to reduce car usage will eradicate ambulances—and that this rhetoric is coming from people who make a profit from both products.
That’s why the humanoid robot is the perfect symbol. While algorithmic data crunching might have some good uses, the very expensive push to develop technology that more specifically replicates human skills—think bipedal walking, think creativity—is the world’s worst party trick. It’s slowing or even reversing the energy transition at a time when every extra emission brings us closer to crisis. It’s taking up vital resources like water and critical minerals. It’s creating a bubble that may soon crash the economy. It’s producing a lot of rubbish and misinformation. And it’s doing all of this for the sole purpose of making investors money by replacing human labor.
Those metal toddlers aren’t funny. They’re part of a multibillion-dollar project to make the future uninhabitable for actual toddlers.
Stat of the Week
$20,500
That’s the average drop in home value for the 25 percent of the nation’s homes that are most vulnerable to hurricanes and wildfires, according to analysis from The New York Times. (It’s more than twice that for the most vulnerable 10 percent.)
What I’m Reading
First, the frogs died. Then people got sick.
Frog mortality used to be an academic curiosity. Then researchers realized it was driving a huge increase of malaria in humans. From the Post’s new series on the impact of biodiversity decline:
In the United States, researchers have shown that a collapse of insect-eating bat populations prompted farmers to use more pesticide on crops, which in turn led to a higher human infant mortality rate.
Around the Great Lakes, the reemergence of gray wolves has had the surprising effect of keeping motorists safe. The canines prowl along roads while hunting, spooking deer from crossing and reducing collisions with cars.
Also in North America, invasive emerald ash borers devastated ash trees, contributing to elevated temperatures and an increase in cardiovascular and respiratory deaths.
India may have witnessed the most astounding ecological breakdown of them all. After vultures experienced a mass die-off, the livestock carcasses they once scavenged piled up. Packs of feral dogs took the place of vultures, resulting in a rise in deaths from rabies.
Read Dino Grandoni’s and Melina Mara’s full report at The Washington Post.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
