The Age of Robots
We're close to making humanlike machines. It's time to reckon with the promises and perils
Bad PR. If it seems like the robot builders are trying to put a kinder, gentler face on their creations, they are. In North America, at least, robots have had terrible PR. We associate robots with herky-jerky movements, brutish strength, and a personality limited to grim, remorseless logic. That, says Mataric, amounts to nothing less than antirobot prejudice. "There are all sorts of misconceptions about robots as halting, mechanical things. It's a stereotype. What people know is what they saw in the old movies. It has nothing to do with reality."
Robots' image is much better in Japan. "I've always taken it for granted that robots are friendly and not something to compete with," says Japanese roboticist Hiroaki Kitano, whose futuristic SIG could win an automaton's beauty contest. "It's very curious for me why the Americans nearly always portray robots [as evil]." In fact, many Japanese researchers credit their childhood love of fictional robots--especially the peppy and resourceful Astro Boy, who delighted postwar Japan--with inspiring the national drive to develop helper robots. By legend, Astro Boy came into being in 2003--a date as significant to Japanese sci-fi aficionados as 2001 is here.
There's more to Japan's domination of the emerging humanoid robot world than an old cartoon, of course. With their traditional markets saturated, says Takeo Kanade of Carnegie Mellon University, corporate giants like Honda and Sony are casting about for new products. "Humanoid robotics is one of many things they're looking at as a potential new industry. They have the money, the technology, and the long-range vision to move into new areas." The products might be toys now, but these and other robotic pioneers are serious about developing humanoids to work as office assistants, caretakers for the elderly, and other human aides.
Living robots. If learning, memory, and creative intelligence really all are possible, then can machine consciousness be far behind? That would depend on what exactly consciousness is, of course, and to date there is no agreed-upon definition. There's no evidence that consciousness exists anywhere outside of a biological brain, notes philosopher Colin McGinn in his book The Mysterious Flame. But neither can anyone point to a reason why it couldn't, short of invoking the religious or mystical. A growing number of experts are beginning to accept that conscious robots are all but inevitable sometime in the future.
The vision they conjure up looks pretty bright for intelligent machines, but our own prospects may be decidedly more grim. In his bracingly ominous Wired essay, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Sun Microsystems' Bill Joy all but sounded the death knell for the human species last year. Advances in robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology, he wrote, could lead to a world populated by super-organisms, both biological and mechanical. By building machines that are like us, only smarter, stronger, and more easily produced, Joy suggests, we could in fact be creating our own worst enemy in an evolutionary battle for survival. James Martin, a technology and business consultant, warns of a coming alien intelligence in his book of the same name. As machines become ever more intelligent, he argues, they will not only outpace our cognitive abilities but will develop new forms of thinking that will be beyond our comprehension. If we can't understand what we've built, we may not be able to control it. Ray Kurzweil, an artificial-intelligence pioneer, gives us about 20 more years of intellectual superiority over computers. By that time, he argues in The Age of Spiritual Machines, computers won't just be intelligent, they'll be conscious, feeling beings deserving of the same rights, privileges, and considerations we give each other.
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