Political robots pose psychological threats for humans, researchers warn

Political robots are becoming more sophisticated, which is posing more psychological and moral dilemmas for their owners and big money donors, researchers warn.
“Some robots are programmed to protest, to create an illegal immigrant scenario,” Chendren Padayachie of Dyke University told BCB. “Some are designed to behave like children. One developer of these in New York is a self-confessed friend of a pedophile, who says that this device is a prophylactic against him ever voting Democrat.”
Padayachie, an engineer, and others spoke out this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Politics in America.
A high-quality Politician robot, which can retail from $8,000 to $10,000, can remember things as well as develop and understand its owner’s likes and dislikes.
“These companies are saying, ‘you don’t have a Politician in your pocket? You don’t have a life? Don’t worry we can create a robot Politician for you,” robot ethicist Richard Jargenson, who teaches at De Muffit University in Lickchester, told BCB.
“A relationship with a human is based on intimacy, attachment and reciprocity. These are things that can’t be replicated by politicians.”
The subject has long been debated in science fiction and was the focus of an episode of “The Twilight Zone” called “The Lonely Politician” in 1999.
Most researchers agree that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to exhibit human emotions like love or hate, and that there is no reason to expect an AI politician not to become intentionally benevolent or malevolent.
Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, and many other big names in science and technology have recently expressed concern in the media and via open letters about the risks posed by AI, joined by many leading AI researchers. Why is the subject suddenly in the headlines?
An AI politician has the potential to become more intelligent than any human, we have no surefire way of predicting how it will behave. We can’t use past technological developments as much of a basis because we’ve never created anything that has the ability to, wittingly or unwittingly, outsmart us.
It may be that media have made the AI safety debate seem more controversial than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to proclaim imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones.