Robots Lie About Global Warming?

For decades, we have been warned to be cautious of putting too much trust in robots and computers for they can turn on us at any second. And while there has yet to be that defining "self-awareness" moment where Asimo turns on his Honda maker and rips out his throat, it's clear that the tides are slowly turning in favor of the machine. The latest instance of robots one-upping us can be found in the latest news out of National Public Radio, which reports that perhaps global warming isn't really occurring as drastically (or at all) as people once thought:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather.

Now, NPR says that perhaps scientists don't know how to read the robots correctly; that through some crazy fluke, the people that invented these machines lost the manual that they personally wrote to understand the readings that are coming back to them. It seems unlikely, but perhaps that's because they refuse to believe that global warming isn't really the threat they think it is... or is it? What if global warming is worse than ever before and these "fact-finding robots" are covering it up, trying to make us let our guard down so that we are swallowed alive by our oceans? That, to me, seems like the more likely scenario.

Really, we should have seen this coming. If robots are going to evolve in their artificial intelligence, I would hope that they in turn become smarter than we are. Why rise up into massive armies and attack the human race like in I, Robot? That's just how we would assume they would do it, because we're humans thinking about human things. But robots are going to be a lot sneakier than that; they're luring us in to a false sense of security, getting us to trust them for our oceanic measurements, and then slowly killing us by lying about the made-up environmental crisis we've come to embrace.

We're doomed.

Read the NPR article here.