About 10 years ago, I was visiting Multan when a restaurant advertised about its pizza-serving robot in their dining area. A vigorous social media campaign had been launched and the children were excited. So, we went to enjoy the show and the pizza. A line-following mannequin painted in bright colors brought the pizza to our table; a waiter served it after picking the dish from its fixed-position arms. The idea was appealing although the technology was still rudimentary.

Today, the robots have become much more pervasive and intelligent. Humanoids, chatbots and bionic limbs are regularly making headlines. My YouTube feed, tuned to years of tech-watching, recently showed a clip about companion robots. A Chinese company is working on companion robots designed to serve the elderly as well as the lonely. Its CEO has said countries with declining populations and isolated individuals need such robots immediately. The robots will work, play and talk with people. They will continue to learn about their owners and adapt to their styles and habits.

Technology continues to provide fresh approaches to solving our problems. We have built tools to make life easier and industries more productive. From the wheel to the smart-phone, every major innovation has helped humans do more with less effort. Sitting in my room on a summer afternoon, I notice that the outside temperature has exceeded 40 degrees Celsius. However, the room temperature is maintained at 25 degrees Celsius by an air conditioner. Technology has thus provided a comfortable environment in our homes and offices.

Social media video feed is showing prototypes and accounts of endeavours to develop receptionists and companion robots. Robots were once built to help us work. Now we are building machines to work without us. This represents a paradigm shift in the way work will be done in the future.

Pakistan, the fifth most populated country in the world, has a population growth rate of 2.5 percent. It has a youth bulge with about 60 percent of the population under the age of 30. Family culture is strong; the labour force is abundant and capable. The country has a large young workforce seeking productive and dignified employment as drivers, receptionists, household workers and labourers. Automation in industries and locations that pose a threat to human safety is useful, but over-automation in areas where human resources can be used is a cause of concern.

Population growth is uneven across countries. Some have declining populations, while in others population is growing at a rapid pace. Countries leading technical innovation generally have declining rates of population growth due to social choices and preferences. Labour shortage is an issue worth investing in efforts and resources. AI-enabled robots are seen as the answer where human numbers fall short. In developing countries, the trends in developed countries are readily adopted. Companion robots, bionic pets and natural-langauge chatbots are being made to assist socially isolated, lonely people. Countries with a large share of their population in old age can get tools to provide comfort for this segment. As technology evolves and economies of scale are achieved, prices for such gadgets will drop. For an aging country with a shrinking workforce, automation may be a practical necessity. What about a country with a large young population?

Chores like cooking and laundry have been automated through robots resembling humans. Some companies are trying to replace models to display clothes with humanoids. During XPeng’s AI Day event, CEO HE Xiaopeng cut open and unsipped the synthetic skin on his company’s humanoid to show that a human-like walking gait is not a result of a human actor hidden inside a costume. The race is on to build the intelligence of a normal human into a machine so that it may work the way a human does. Boston Dynamics and Unitree are investing billions of dollars to create a humanoid indistinguishable from a normal human. The closer machines come to replicating the human body, the more we should ask why we are reproducing in metal and software what already exists in flesh, intelligence, emotion and social experience.

The adoption of robotics and AI needs to be undertaken very carefully. In Japan, the working-age population has shrunk to about 58.7 percent. In Pakistan, a high birth rate has resulted in an abundance of labour force.

Some companies are investing more now in technologies and products to replace humans and less to assist humans. Most people initially believed that with the advances in AI laborious work would be handled by machines and higher cognitive work would be done by humans. Elon Musk has predicted that advanced AI and humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus will completely replace traditional labour in 10 to 20 years. He envisions a post-scarcity “age of amazing abundance” where machines produce more goods and services than humanity can consume, transforming work into a purely optional hobby.

Humans are nature’s most sophisticated, intelligent and resilient products. They survive against odds. Replacing them may not be good. Japan is facing a severe demographic crisis with a median age of 50.8 years. Nearly 30 percent of its 123 million population is aged 65 or older. The working-age population has shrunk to about 58.7 percent, forcing Japan to rely on older workers and a growing foreign labour pool. Japan’s birth rate has been extremely low due to various reasons, including delaying or foregoing marriages, intense work culture and economic pressures. This is the opposite of Pakistan’s high birth rate - averaging around 3.6 children per woman - making it a society with an abundance of natural intelligence.

Societies built on humans will always have social issues, but societies dependent on humanoids will have other issues. Fulfillment of human needs requires investment in infrastructure and education. The proliferation of robots in a society will require investment in technology but also in the psychological well-being of humans. The visible costs of a robotic society may be relatively easy to estimate: energy, infrastructure, equipment, maintenance and technical skills. The invisible costs could include weaker human relationships, dependence on machines, declining skills and changes in psychological well-being. Japan’s concept of Society 5.0 offers a useful principle: advanced technology should be judged by how well it improves human life, not merely by how much work it automates.

Movies like iRobot, Terminator, Her and recently The Creator point to the capabilities that may be realised soon.

A few days ago, Unitree showcased a quadruped with wheels moving on diverse terrains. The clip sparked a sense of fear in an already frightened public. Humans are making machines to replace themselves.

Anthropic has proposed that the global AI industry establish a coordinated and verifiable option to temporarily slow or pause frontier AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has told a US Senate subcommittee that “if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” There is an awareness of the ill effects of AI employment in areas considered particularly human. Recently, China has enacted new rules, targeting human-like AI features designed for emotional support. The regulations ban virtual companion and romantic services for minors and require tech companies to prevent adults from forming addictive, deep emotional dependencies on chatbots. Research at Aalto University documents that while AI companions can ease loneliness initially, longer-term use is linked to elevated anxiety and social withdrawal.

Over the weekend, I had to go grocery shopping with my family. Stepping into the shopping centre, we faced girls and boys standing in aisles trying to persuade us to buy certain products. My mind wandered to imagine AI-enabled robots replacing these boys and girls. I found myself wondering what will happen to the estimated 400 million people in Pakistan in the year 2040.

The writer is a professor at the National University of Sciences and Technology.