[mattmanser]

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

[Raphmedia]

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.

[mattmanser]

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.

[tomjen3]

So basically house elfs?

[Qwertious]

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.