Robots: are those now realities? Has anybody watched the old move iRobot? The one with Will Smith? The second law of robots and those great things. Fascinating. But is it reality? That is the right question to ask. We probably all know a definition of a robot: An artificial agent and some other words where it becomes very difficult. So, we know what it is. According to Wikipedia: “Robots have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks which humans prefer not to do, or are unable to do because of size limitations, or which take place in extreme environments such as outer space or the bottom of the sea”. That sounds OK. Anybody ever watched Robocop? But that is actually right here: Wiki again: “Chemists at the University of Nebraska have created a humidity gauge by fusing a bacteria to a silicone computer chip”. Robocop is here in another few years or months. The real good question here is that if Robocop has still got his brain, he is a human, never mind all the electronics making him move. But what if his brain was also gone and he instead had an ‘Artificial Intelligence’ computer? This is called AI, btw. So, here we have some more definitions: Again Wikipedia! “The two ways that robots differ from actual beings are, simply stated, in the domain
of cognition, and in the domain of biological form. The general consensus is that a "robot" is a machine and not a being simply because it is not intelligent (it requires programming to function), regardless of how humanlike it may appear. In contrast, an imaginary "machine" or "artificial life form" (as in science fiction) that could think near or above human intelligence, and had a sensory body, would no longer be a "robot" but would be some kind of "artificial being" or "cognitive robot". If we look at engineering, it is not so difficult. Making a robot with four legs which can carry burdens and run like it is going out of fashion, or a nano-robot or those drones the military all over are using, well, we can do that. Those a real robots. But hey, where does it leave iRobot? It is the intelligence of it all. And now we need to look at that. Wikipedia again: “Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, selfawareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving. It can also be more generally described as the ability to perceive information and retain it as knowledge for applying to itself or other instances of knowledge or information, thereby creating referable understanding models of any size, density, or complexity,
due to any conscious or subconscious imposed will or instruction to do so” That is a mouthful, but in essence: Is there anything we see there that we cannot program? I could do a lot of that in LISP twenty years ago. AI is of course all about programming. The hot thing now is that computers are so massively powerful and having so much memory (organised very smartly) that it is hard to not look at iRobot and knowing this is close. There is right now an experiment running where a set of humans are having a conversation with either robots or other humans. They can’t really figure out who they are talking to. This is the new scary world. Wikipedia again: “If research into Strong AI produced sufficiently intelligent software, it might be able to reprogram and improve itself. The improved software would be even better at improving itself, leading to recursive selfimprovement. The new intelligence could thus increase exponentially and dramatically surpass humans. Science fiction writer Vernor Vinge named this scenario "singularity". Technological
singularity is when accelerating progress in technologies will cause a runaway effect wherein artificial intelligence will exceed human intellectual capacity and control, thus radically changing or even ending civilization. Because the capabilities of such an intelligence may be impossible to comprehend, the technological singularity is an occurrence beyond which events are unpredictable or even unfathomable. Ray Kurzweil has used Moore's law (which describes the relentless exponential improvement in digital technology) to calculate that desktop computers will have the same processing power as human brains by the year 2029, and predicts that the singularity will occur in 2045” The next generation? If you are 18 today, you will be 48 in 1945. And obsolete! Is it all doom and gloom? Not necessarily! We have to realise that we cannot stop developments. But we might be able to control the direction at least. And that might be the best we can hope for.