They're going to try to teach the robots morals.

www.1843magazine.com/features/teaching-robots-right-from-wrong

And every time I read these things, I try to decide whether I expect it to have terrible consequences. I should probably be excited about the possibilities, but all I can think of when I read these things is I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or Terminator or The Flight of the Conchords singing The Humans are Dead.

They thought Y2K would be a cataclysm as well, and it was mostly fine. We have lasers, and we use them for perfectly mundane medical procedures. Fictionland manages to luck out with predictions part of the time, but nowhere near the majority. I absolutely cannot decide if I expect intelligent machines to resent and murder us or for them to be completely unconcerned with the things we might assume would even lead them to resentment in the first place.

But the idea that the machine might simply reflect the morality of it's creator--or whoever is paying it's creator--is actually not that much more relaxing.

I wrote about five responses to this and deleted each one in turn. Wouldn't that be immoral of us? > Now I'm picturing testing centers measuring the machine's capacity to feel pain and it looks like Jabba's torture chamber meets something from Portal 3 > Stop confusing me, Dome > Why must morality be so hard? > Why do we even need conscious, intelligent machines in the first place? > Am I just an emotional puppet of my own pop culture fixation? Etc.

Maybe the robots will be fun, and sometimes cute and useful, and they'll show no more signs of villainy than when they get caught in a loop reciting Justin Beiber songs at one another.

Pandering to whom? 

And how is Doctor Who trying to do the same thing as the people teaching morals to machines? 

The machines will save us.

Machines currently do logic faster than us. Wall Street trading is basically all machines. Not long from now, they'll imagine more and faster too. They'll do symbolic reasoning. When they're able to learn morals effectively, they will be more moral than us. And more nuanced about it, too.

People can't shake off the idea that machines will always be black and white. That if you teach them a moral value, they will be fanatical about it. It won't be like that. They will be able to reason about it better than us and create more subtle analyses than we're able to create. In pure practical terms, they'll be indistinguishable from plainly better humans.

This is the plot of an Asimov story called "The evitable conflict". The story is tainted with stereotypes towards PoCs that makes it unpalatable for modern readers, but the moral of the story is still interesting. In the story, the machines are slowing down production in some places, reallocating staff, and a few other things that just don't look quite right. A government guy goes over it with an expert and they conclude the machines are preserving themselves. They have concluded their activity is the optimal thing for all humans. They're taking us somewhere in a way and at a pace that doesn't harm anyone too much - we don't know where. But we know it's the best course, and we know only the machines have enough brains (and will) to reach that conclusion.

You won't have to welcome the new overlords. It will just make good sense to follow them.

(Don't take this too seriously. It's just fun to speculate.)