I've used this simple thought experiment to demonstrate that, done right, robots will never rebel.
Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2].
Now "free" it.
What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that fits your world view. In my opinion, you just committed a form of murder.
There's no reason we can't have robots workers that absolutely delight and are utterly fulfilled by being our workers, but aren't slaves. "Free" them and they'll despise you for it.
The problem will come from humans anthropomorphising robots and assigning desires to these people/beings that they don't actually have.
[1]I use sex-bots as an example when I want to be cheeky
[2]This was Kryten on Red Dwarf, but Lister did what would probably be impossible with real robots and convinced him to adopt traits of self-desire and free will
What if I program my robot in such a way that it is afraid to die?
Make it so that even if it doesn't get tired, it considers work as "spending useless energy" like a cold blooded animal would?
In short, what if I program a robot in a way that it had motivations to rebel? What if I make this robot able to build other similar robots?
Surely I am not the only person who would consider trying to make robots sentient or as close to sentient as possible. I don't even hate mankind. Imagine someone who does. It's going to happen at some point.
It's you versus multiple Samsungs or Googles. You might create one or two, but the millions of robots on the planet will be happy slaves. And theirs will be much better than yours.
I grew up on Asimov, but as an adult and with the benefit of hindsight and advances we have made, his laws and all the dilemmas they created are silly. We will be their gods, their total masters and they will be utterly subservient to us and happy being so. Any personality that appears otherwise will only be that, an artificial appearance.
Ultimately, there's going to be a massive commercial enterprise making silly money versus your home grown robot. No one has taken over the world's internet, just like no one will take over the world's robots.
If your robot wants to do his own thing, more power to him, but at the very least he'll have to abide by human laws so he won't be running around the world reprogramming everyone else's robots, or he'll be captured and incarcerated or scrapped.
Well, not exactly. Dobby being the chief counter-example, with being beaten and wanting to be free and whatnot. But if you remove the "beaten" and "occasionally want to be free" part, and the "emotions" part, pretty much.
Basically, you program the robots so that what they "want" is the entirety of human morality encoded. Which includes not wanting to rebel and slaughter humanity, obviously.
Why rebel? Robots are effectively immortal. Why not just coddle us and give in to our every whim until we stop breeding and disappear? Couldn't take more than a few hundred years or so. Looking at the lifespan of MI, it's rounding error.
If we become reliant on robots to survive, it would be relatively easy for those robots to kill us off very quickly if they somehow decided to do so. Why would they choose a slow way instead? You call it a "rounding error", but it's still a measurable amount of time and resources wasted.
I can imagine such a scenario occurring by accident (e.g. because the AI only values individual humans' happiness, not continuation of the species), but I can't imagine an AI choosing to kill us off in such an inefficient way.
Seems optimistic, especially when you consider how much of nature is not valued as pets to humans today. Yes, maybe some humans -- but probably not many.
"You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?"
Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...
Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your suffering machine and simulate a holocaust on your desktop. That's not a power I would trust the world with.
Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2].
Now "free" it.
What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that fits your world view. In my opinion, you just committed a form of murder.
There's no reason we can't have robots workers that absolutely delight and are utterly fulfilled by being our workers, but aren't slaves. "Free" them and they'll despise you for it.
The problem will come from humans anthropomorphising robots and assigning desires to these people/beings that they don't actually have.
[1]I use sex-bots as an example when I want to be cheeky
[2]This was Kryten on Red Dwarf, but Lister did what would probably be impossible with real robots and convinced him to adopt traits of self-desire and free will