(This is Part 10 of a series. Go back to Part 9.)
2c. The rise of intelligent robots
This was going to be the article where I talk about robots. But since everybody already knows that I'm a complete robot myself, and since everyone I'm talking to is also a complete robot, what would be the point of talking about it?
That stopped me for awhile. But then I thought, so what if I'm a robot? It doesn't prevent me from loving, speaking, belching or pretending to act intelligent. In fact, it doesn't prevent me from anything at all. After all, I'm a complex robot! Come to think of it, so is everybody else.
We tend to think of robots today as cute little things, like Sony's robot dog, or the soon-to-appear little vacuum cleaner that looks like a little disc on the floor and randomly cleans our floors and rugs without any supervision. I can't wait. Either that, or we see pictures of giant and ubiquitous robots at auto plants, assembling vehicles faster and more precisely than humans can.
Me, I want a robot that can go to the fridge and get me a beer. That presents some surprising and formidable problems, as some experts have pointed out, but nothing that won't be solved in a few years.
Already existing is a robot called Kismet that has various "expressions" and can follow interesting things with its eyes. People react emotionally to it, but is it reacting emotionally to them? Of course not. But the day will come when it will, when it will actually be feeling the emotions inside that it is displaying outside.
As robots keep evolving, we'll keep backing up more and more so we can keep on staying special, that is, keep on differentiating ourselves from robots. "Okay, they can beat us at chess, but they can't write a symphony." "Okay, they can write a symphony, but they can't feel what it's like to be grieving." "Okay, they can feel emotions but they can't really have self-consciousness." And so on. All of those "can'ts" will eventually be proven false.
The next big step from where we are now will be robots with what Rodney Brooks calls remote presence. For example, let's say we took a business trip across the world. From any browser we could check our home by "inhabiting" our home robot as it walked around the house. As our robot walked around we would see what it saw, hear what it heard, and adjust whatever it adjusted.
The next step would be what are called supervisory commands. That is, instead of moving the robot around from our browser, we would give it high-level commands such as "Check to see that the oven is switched off," and it would know what to do. Pretty cool, huh?
But it doesn't stop there. Not too far in the future—maybe a couple of decades, give or take—we'll walk into a department store or a boutique robot shop and order our new "personal servant" (or whatever name it's called at that time).
This will no longer be a mere "robot," but a true android. It will look remarkably like a human being, with incredibly lifelike skin and very mobile and expressive features. It will have a full personality, one that's user-selectable of course. Our android will be what robot researchers call situated, that is, not needing human control or supervison but responding independently to its environment.
If we want it to, this personal servant will go everywhere with us. And we'll probably want it to, because it will be so helpful. We'll be able to fully converse with it, for example. It will connected to the internet at all times, so it will be able to accomplish all sorts of things virtually instantaneously. "Book a flight for next Tuesday that'll get us into Los Angeles by 8am," you say, and it's done.
Our personal servant will be able to project any video or internet file as a 3-D holographic image in front of us. Any place, any time, we'll be able to watch a movie, perform work, surf the internet, converse with a friend, attend a meeting, head into a virtual world and so on.
But eventually it'll be even more, real intelligence: "Would you briefly summarize Spinoza's main points for me?" "What do you think Jane meant by that comment?" "Do you think I'm dressed okay for this party?" In other words, our personal servant will morph into perhaps our closest companion. We'll tell it our deepest fears and joys. It will know more about us than anyone else and we will come to think of it as our closest friend and advisor. It will graduate from being our personal servant to being our personal companion, and we'll buy it in a store.
It won't know everything about us right away, of course. It'll have some initial programming, yes, but mostly it'll learn about us and the world
experientially, that is, as it journeys along with us in our life. In that sense it may seem like a precocious though full-sized teenager when we first purchase it, one that only gradually evolves into our full personal companion and most indispensable possession.
Such a personal companion will naturally be a tremendous boon to the elderly, to the disabled, to the lonely, or to otherwise unaccompanied children. In other forms it will also find multiple uses in business, in the military, in dangerous or challenging environments and in countless other ways and forms for ordinary humans. Some of us will even fall in love with our personal companions. Eventually, though it may take a bit longer, some of us may even experience love from it.
But of course it won't stop there either...
(This is the end of Part 10. Go to Part 11.)
—jim sloman, for 1.4.06
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