Great article on slate.com about the risks of robots:

President Obama visited Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center to announce up to $70 million to fund theNational Robotics Initiative. In his remarks, Obama quipped, “You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as commander-in-chief is to keep an eye on robots. And I’m pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful—at least for now.”

We all love a good robot-apocalypse joke. After IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing computer Watson beat the game show’s reigning human champions, Fox News declared, “Our robot overlord isn’t named HAL or SkyNET—it’s Watson.” The same jokes cropped up in 2007 when robots began to take the place of child jockeys on the camel-racing circuit, learned to juggle, panhandle, and buy scones. But not many people actually believe this is a threat. For all their advances, robots are still generally able to execute only those tasks that they are specifically programmed to carry out. But as the speed of robot advances increases—and with Obama’s new National Robotics Initiative, the developments will, he hopes, come that much quicker—there are genuine robot-safety discussions that we need to have—not about them working too well and taking over civilization, but about them not working well enough.

Hope over and read the whole article.