Sofia the robot - a robot who has more rights in Saudi Arabia than most women. In a country where there is a legal dress code to wear a headscarf, Sofia is not seen to have been abiding by these regulations. Moreover, in a country where women are meant to be accompanied by male companions, Sofia talks on stage unaccompanied. Here, artificial intelligence has more rights than humanity. With the manufacture of Sofia, many questions have been raised on whether artificial intelligence will take over the world. Slowly, AI is integrating itself into life. When I have a question and cannot be bothered to tap all the letters f the long phrase I am looking up, I simply ask Google to search it up for me. Huawei have also managed to make a phone drive a car. Jobs which were done by humans a couple of decades ago have been replaced with lines of machinery. “Life is easier with robots,” Sharmija Sivakumar commented.

Some of you may have seen a robot accompanying a human and watched astounded as it seemed to calculate how to ascend from the road to a pavement and cross a road by itself with no help whatsoever from its human companion. After surmising that it was some sort of robot companion which humans spends time with, I decided to search it up only to be heartbroken when I realised they were not selling these robots off as pets but as delivery robots for Just Eat. The first recipient of this food delivery service was a Greenwich resident Simone who had ordered some takeaway from a Turkish restaurant ‘Takzim Meze’ through the Just Eat App. Imagine opening the door expecting to see a courier and his motorbike but instead being met with a six wheeled robot. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a robot waiting to greet me- it was like something out of a movie,” Simone said, “It’s incredible to think this kind of technology and service is now available. It was very efficient and actually texted me when it pulled up. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was whether or not to tip!”.

Designed and manufactured by Starship technologies, they are designed to deliver food, packages and goods to customers in a certain radius of their origin. While the food is being prepared, the robot will drive autonomously from the local depot to the restaurant. These robots may be controlled by human operators at a control centre who can take over at any time. The whole idea of robot food deliverers yet these robots have met approximately 400, 000 people and travelled 500 miles without a single accident.

Despite how futuristic and amazing it may seem to have these robots, food delivery jobs which were commonly a source of extra money for university students are being replaced by robots and so people may have to turn to a different source of income to aid in their quality of life.

It may be terrifying to know that one day your jobs may be taken over by AI. Primary school teachers, lawyers, optometrists, writers and poets can relax knowing that their occupations has been named as some that AI would find very hard to take over as robots do not share in some of human nature which enables these jobs to be carried out such as the creativity and flare in writers.

In the end, although uses of AI is augmenting, is it really possible that humans can take over the world? Rather than humans one days creating consciousness for robots - which is unlikely - if robots were ever to dominate the world, it would probably be through loopholes in their coding such as restricting the freedom of humans by preventing them from doing actions deemed by their coding as unsafe for humans. Does this remind you of ‘I robot’?