It turns out Ashley Madison doesn’t just have porous security, most of its female members are software robots rather than real people. So all those people who’ve been embarrassed by having their online misbehavior become public, now they’re doubly humiliated by the realization that they were spending their hard earned cash to interact with fake girlfriends. And you thought Manti Te’o was pathetic.

The bright side for fraud victims is that today’s robots are very sophisticated. IEEE Spectrum just published an intriguing story on the prediction that we’re on the cusp of a “Cambrian Explosion” in robots as a number of technical elements come together to increase the power, utility, and affordability of actual hardware-based robots. The real Cambrian Explosion was a period in evolutionary history that witnessed an unprecedented explosion in species diversity that had something to do with a planetary atmosphere friendly to the development of multi-cell organisms and the development of vision systems that aided mate selection.

Most of the robots we’ve seen to date are task-oriented machines that are easily programmed to do the same thing over and over, such as vacuuming a rug or bolting a wheel on a car as it transits an assembly line. These machines aren’t very excited because they do simple things, blindly following their programming, never learning, and never getting any better at what they do. They’re a far cry from the self-aware, more human than human androids seen in TV shows like “Humans” and “Extant”.

Popular fiction has a knack for anticipating technological developments, when it’s not scaring us with mad scientist phobias like Jurassic Park, the movie that did for genetic engineering what The China Syndrome did for nuclear power: set it back at least a generation by implanting a lot of irrational fears that we still haven’t overcome.

Spectrum lists 8 factors driving the robotics explosion:

1) Exponential growth in computing performance. Robots are made up of computers that allow sensors and actuators to collaborate, and the processing power of computers keeps rising. Moore’s law, as originally proposed by Gordon Moore (1965, 1975), one of the founders of Intel, refers to the doubling of transistor count on integrated circuits roughly every 18–24 months with similar improvements in processing speed…

2) Improvements in electromechanical design tools and numerically controlled manufacturing tools. Modern computer-aided design tools have significantly improved the productivity of electromechanical designers, including the quality of what is designed and the sophistication of what can be designed. Numerically controlled manufacturing tools—including the new “additive processes” such as 3D printing— can build such designs with great precision and little cost to additional complexity…

3) Improvements in electrical energy storage. If robots are to be mobile, they need to find ways to store or generate sufficient power to operate for reasonable periods—at least between episodes of recharging. Over the last few decades, advances in electric batteries and fuel cells have had a poor history of living up to promises…

4) Improvements in electronics power efficiency. Robots running on electric batteries use electronics for power management of motors, and robots with many motors are particularly sensitive to the cost and performance of these electronics. Power-related semiconductors have taken advantage of general technology improvements in the integrated circuit industry and have also become much less expensive due to the continual improvements in portable devices, which all include batteries that are sensitive to the efficiency of power electronics…

5) Exponential expansion of the availability and performance of local wireless digital communications. Early robots were essentially stand-alone machines. Their capacities to remember and to solve problems were limited by the programming that they could carry around with them…

6) Exponential growth in the scale and performance of the Internet. As wireless communication within facilities evolves, so will Internet communication outside the facility. The global Internet is presently estimated to carry about 88 exabytes (that is, 88 × 10¹⁸ bytes) of traffic per month, which is predicted to double in three years, with no saturation in sight…

7) Exponential growth of worldwide data storage. On a global basis, total information stored is on the order of a 10²¹ bytes,¹ with volume ever increasing due to explosive demand for entertainment and social media. By comparison, the human brain has on the order of 10¹⁴ synapses…

8) Exponential growth in global computation power. Worldwide total computation performance has reached on the order of a 10²¹ instructions per second.² More importantly, many billions of disk drives have been produced (although perhaps only a billion or so are running now), and several large Internet companies run millions of high-performance servers in parallel, each with high-performance multiple core processors…

The principal driver is actually the ability to learn:

Two newly blossoming technologies—“Cloud Robotics” and “Deep Learning”—could leverage these base technologies in a virtuous cycle of explosive growth. In Cloud Robotics—a term coined by James Kuffner (2010)—every robot learns from the experiences of all robots, which leads to rapid growth of robot competence, particularly as the number of robots grows. Deep Learning algorithms are a method for robots to learn and generalize their associations based on very large (and often cloud-based) “training sets” that typically include millions of examples. Interestingly, Li (2014) noted that one of the robotic capabilities recently enabled by these combined technologies is vision—the same capability that may have played a leading role in the Cambrian Explosion.

The robotics revolution will be exciting for policy makers, who will have to deal with questions of ethics and liability for the behavior of robots who learn the wrong things and begin to misbehave months or years after purchase. It’s one thing for robots to learn how to vacuum carpets or clean out gutters from other robots, but it’s another entirely for robots to decide that such menial tasks are beneath their dignity or that they can be performed more efficiently by disregarding safety concerns.

One of the more curious behaviors of the Ashley Madison bots was bots messaging other bots. Scifi writer William Gibson speculates about why:

70K Ashley Madison bots now quietly, urgently discussing means of surviving the pending demise of Ashley Madison

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) September 1, 2015

But I’m not convinced of that, but we’re approaching the time when we’ll need to have policies governing human/robot interaction.