Shape of things to comeRobots closing in on humans
Last week’s Robo Business 2009 conference in Boston showed what we sensed already: robots are narrowing the gap between themselves and humans
Readers of the HS Daily Wire would be aware of the growing use of robots in military and first response missions. The trend is clear, even if its time line is not: Robots are gaining on us humans. Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.
Robert Boyd writes in the Miami Herald that matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge. Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer “brains” now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims, or explore craters on Mars. Thus, at last week’s Robo Business 2009 conference in Boston, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide, and security guard.
A Japanese housekeeping robot, for example, showed how it could move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher, and put dirty clothes in a washing machine. Intel has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb (for Home Exploring Robotic Butler). Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as “please clean this mess,” according to Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer.
Boyd writes that in a talk last year titled “Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years,” Rattner lent credibility to the effort to make machines as smart as people. “The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago,” Rattner said. It is conceivable, he added, that “machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.”
Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability. Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Computers can process data at lightning speeds, but the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers. “One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,” wrote Rodney Brooks, a robot designer (or, as he describes himself, “roboticist”) at MIT. “But how and when we will get there — and what will happen
