The all-powerful “Man”
A government armed with a ubiquitous surveillance system and an army of killer robots is one that is essentially immune to revolution. The United States government is all right when it’s not testing chemical weapons on its citizens, but it is a necessary quality of a functioning free state that the people at least have the capability to resist. A human army ensures that the government is vulnerable to justified civil unrest, since human soldiers are capable of refusing unjust orders. Faced with an army of grenade-hurling robot helicopters, however, civilian unrest, even with the aid of the human army, is doomed to failure.
Finally, as robots grow more intelligent and we rely on them more and more to perform dangerous or boring tasks, might they one day come to resent us? It’s inevitable that computer scientists will eventually create a sentient machine, but will that machine think and feel as we do? Will it essentially be a human being, born, as it will be, out of our own thoughts? Or will we have created an alien creature with thoughts and emotions beyond our ability to understand—and what will that mean for us?
Someday, possibly in the very near future, we will need to consider what we do with machines that are our intellectual and philosophical peers, rather than simple tools. The decisions we make then may very well define our species for generations.