For some reason, people are sad about the gruesome beheading of hitchBOT, the hitchhiking robot that was trying to make its way from Massachusetts to California. HitchBOT met his end in Philadelphia last week, which means everyone is using it as an opportunity to dust off their favorite Philadelphia jokes.
Of course, since hitchBOT was able to travel across all of Canada and much of Germany, people are also using this as an excuse to rail on Americans for being brainless heathens. While that might be true much of the time, the world should be thanking the United States for killing hitchBOT and stalling the self-destructive dreams of a couple of misguided Canadian social scientists.
Plus, you should never pick up hitchhikers anyway.
HitchBOT was built to teach us all about “trust, notions of safety, and…our attitude towards technology.” HitchBOT taught me that Americans are going to do just fine when the robotic uprising eventually happens around the world. We already know not to trust robots, no matter how cute they’re built to look, with their silly swimming noodle appendages and smiling face screens. When artificial intelligence becomes sentient and Canada and Europe begin to burn because they trusted some even-cuter sentient robots, convinced we could live among them in harmony, we can point to hitchBOT and say, “See? We always knew this could happen, and we never took any chances.” One day, this will serve as a message to the world’s artificial would-be overlords that the United States ISN’T GOING TO BACK DOWN.
Each step forward in robotics and artificial intelligence just brings us one step closer to humanity’s extinction. The Terminator films stress this and so does Stephen Hawking, so what other evidence do you need to not make robots an integral part of our society? Why are we supposed to mourn the death of a robot that was most likely an early incarnation of the same robots that will one day enslave us? The Philadelphians who destroyed hitchBOT are heroes.
I’m also not entirely convinced that hitchBOT wasn’t already sentient and didn’t already have ulterior motives. He never should have even made it as far as he did.
Burn in hell, hitchBOT.