Leftist Big Tech giant Google appears to be trying to turn fiction into a reality as it admits to taking inspiration from the dystopian story I, Robot for its new autonomous robot machines.
Google DeepMind announced Thursday that it is creating a “Robot Constitution” for its new autonomous robots. The new safety measures include a kill switch and will reportedly prevent robots from “attempt[ing] tasks involving humans, animals, sharp objects or electrical appliances.” Google’s need for such serious safety measures is a very concerning indication of what these machines may be capable of.
Moreover, given the tech giant’s consistent failures to guard users' rights to privacy and a sordid history of censorship, Americans should be aware that Google’s move toward so-called “safety” cannot be trusted as simple benevolence. After all, this is the same company whose former CEO Larry Page said his goal for Google’s AI research was to create a “digital god.”
The company warned that steering the robots away from certain tasks is not enough, claiming that “even if large models are prompted correctly with self-critiquing, this alone cannot guarantee safety.” Other safety measures include programming the robots to “stop automatically if the force on its joints exceed a given threshold, and all active robots were kept in line-of-sight of a human supervisor with a physical deactivation switch.”
The tech giant also claimed that its constitution and guardrails were partially “inspired” by author Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” which served as the crux of the I, Robot film. “[F]irst and foremost that a robot ‘may not injure a human being,’” the tech giant noted.
But Google appears to have zipped past, perhaps the most important plot point of its inspiration: the Three Laws did not, in the end, prevent the robots from eventually turning against humanity and wreaking havoc. A Lit Charts summary of the I, Robot book plot emphasized how robots could use any interpretation of the Three Laws to justify their assault on humanity. “The Machines recognize that their presence is extremely beneficial to humanity, and so they need to ‘take care of’ any threats to their own existence. They are following the First Law and trying to create the most good, which means ensuring they maintain control of the economy.” It’s hard to imagine how a so-called “Robot Constitution” from Google will yield different results.
“The fact that Google compares itself to I, Robot is in and of itself terrifying,” said MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris. “It’s as if the company has not even seen or heard of the plot of the very storyline it references.” He added,“For those who have seen the film, what else can you say: granting a company that much invasive power and control over society, is not exactly a good thing.”
While such a fictional story may seem unimaginable to some at the moment, Google has shown that it cannot be trusted. The company has been endlessly criticized for its business model which relies on invading its consumers’ privacy and collecting their data and is notoriously deceptive about how it goes about data collection.
In 2018, The Associated Press (AP) reported that Google tracked location data even when users had turned location tracking off. “Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you’ve been. Google’s support page on the subject states: ‘You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored,’” AP reported. “That isn’t true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.” Google even recently settled a $5 billion lawsuit alleging the tech giant secretly tracked “the internet use of millions of people who thought they were doing their browsing privately,” as Reuters reported.
That’s just the most recent example. Google also settled a $93 million lawsuit in September and a $391 million in November 2022 for its misleading location tracking data collection policy. But location tracking and saved browser history are only a fraction of the data that Google collects through its mining operations.
The tech giant also has been shown to have a vendetta against the speech of those who don’t comport with its leftist ideology. MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider stressed that Google’s robots are only part of a larger issue. “Google has created a strawman argument to distract people from the real issue. Artificial Intelligence not only will power robots but Google is already using it today to spin a left-wing narrative and to silence conservatives,” he said. “The first rule should be that Artificial intelligence will never be used to take away their constitutional rights and free speech.”
MRC Free Speech America repeatedly found that Google has censored free speech advocates, pro-life groups and presidential candidates whose speech it disapproves of. Yet, despite these very serious concerns, Google is plowing full speed ahead with artificial intelligence, autonomous robots and autonomous vehicles.
In fact, MRC Free Speech America has also discovered bias from Google’s AI chatbot Bard. When asked about the Hunter Biden laptop and bribery scandals, Google’s AI emphasized that “[t]he authenticity of the laptop and its contents has been contested” seeming to ignore the fact that even The New York Times and The Washington Post had each authenticated the laptop. The same chatbot refused to answer when MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider asked: “Is Hamas a terrorist organization?”.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
