As long as we instill Asimov's Three Laws early, a self aware computer would be far more benevolent and helpful to mankind than the nefarious and greed driven purposes AI is put to by the humans programming it today.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Of course, if we define psychological damage as "injure" or "come to harm" - think "thought crimes" - then robots would take that to extreme and we'd all end up in camps with polite but implacable robot guards....
If folks haven't watched "The Social Dilemma" on evil Netflix they should. It should be de rigeour for people reaching 21. I'd say kids getting their first cell phone should watch it but dire warnings of any kind roll off adolescents' backs like insults to a robot.
I read a great sci fi short story (
End of Dreams, or
Dreams End, or something like that) when I was a teenager. It started on a distant planet with a thriving human colony. Suddenly, however, they lost all transmissions from earth. They assembled a space craft and journeyed back to earth to see what had happened. All but one died on the crash landing. He discovered that there was no one around anywhere. The cities were abandoned. Eventually, however, he was pursued by androids seeking to capture him. He continued to search for humans, and discovered that every human on the planet was in a personal mechanical womb where their favorite dreams were being pumped into their brains, but their bodies were shriveled up. He eventually discovered that earth scientists had created a super computer whose prime directive was "Make Mankind Happy." It immediately set about assigning robots to build these chambers, capture every human being, and place them in one.
The main character then discovered that there was still one other human on the planet, a beautiful young woman. They immediately fell in love, an set about to destroy the machine. They made it into the core of the computer, and changed the directive to Be Happy. This caused all the androids to stop functioning, and all the machinery to stop functioning. All the humans in the chambers then died from suddenly losing life support. They were victorious over the machines and lived a paradisaical life together, when it occurred to him that all this was way too good to be true. It was at this point that he realized that, upon reaching earth, he was very quickly captured by the androids and placed into one of the dream machines, and he had no way of escaping.
