An insightful article in today’s Chicago Tribune suggests that while the field of robotics has advanced considerably beyond expectations over the last 40 years, science and technology have a long ways to go before achieving the level of robustness and utility that many still dream of achieving in a robot. We should make no mistakes, robotic intelligence can do a lot today: “robots guided by their own computer ‘brains’ now can land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer and explore craters on Mars.”
However, the gold standard for many robot enthusiasts remains the same—to build machines that can match the level of human intelligence. This goal however remains “an enormously difficult—perhaps impossible—challenge.” Well-known robotics expert and futurist, Hans Moravec, has given expression to this viewpoint in a recent article in Scientific American magazine: “By 2040, I believe, we will finally achieve the original goal of robotics and a thematic mainstay of science fiction: a freely moving machine with the intellectual capabilities of a human being.”
A similar ideal is also shared by Rodney Brooks, noted roboticist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence. But how and when we will get there — and what will happen after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.”
Today’s Chicago Tribune article also references Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, and the talk he presented last year titled, Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years, in which some credibility was given to the often-ridiculed effort to make machines as smart as people. In that talk, Rattner pointed out that “the [robotics] industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago.” It’s conceivable, he added, that “machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.” Futurists refer to the theoretical future point at which technological acceleration finally arrives at the construction of machines smarter than humans as The [Technological] Singularity.
While the primary obstacle that remains to building super-robots, of course, has to do with replicating the complexity of the human brain, scientific and technological trends in recent years have also given us much more reason to be optimistic. The monumental increase in computing power in the last 30 years has led some experts to project plausibly that in the next few decades artificial intelligence will have attained the ability to mimic human cognitive processing and to perform at hundreds of billions of calculations per second. What is likely is that predicting the future of robotics will be as difficult as it would have been to imagine a mind-controlled humanoid robot 30 years ago.
A major aim of Zygbotics is to provide a resource for showcasing the emergence of new researches aimed at designing and constructing the next generation of humanoid robots. The primary heuristic of this site is that building the next generation of advanced robots will also depend upon fundamental breakthroughs in the merging together of biological and electro-mechanical systems to achieve new advances in the replication of human motion and cognition.
The future of robotics will look significantly different than anything propagated to this point through the traditional disciplines of computer science, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering. Going forward, the development and advancement of scalable and open-domain resources and techniques will rely on various sets of new multi-disciplinary collaborations between the realms of artificial intelligence, bioelectronics, nanotechnology, molecular biology, physics, and biomimetics—fields which will be delivered through such state of the art industries as neurobioengineering, neuromorphic engineering, and quantum computing.
Given these kinds of developments, projected over the next several decades, it is quite plausible to envision robotic intelligences that will be equipped with a level of cognition similar to a small child, but with the ability to mature and eventually express significant levels of reason—enough to even say, “I think, therefore I am . . . a robot?”
Tags: future of robotics, humanoid robotics, neurobioengineering, neuromorphic engineering, Zygbotics
yes robots will do the work, but u came to an interestin end..im already a robot..creatin robots!
I really do hope that we’ll all still be around when “Metal Gears” becomes real.
Beautifully written article. I agree that the current convergence of what appeared previously to be unrelated fields will accelerate the development and emergence of ever increasing complexity in machine intelligence. I would also suggest that once AI reaches child level intelligence, it would not take as long as it’s human counterpart to achieve the intelligence of an adult (and beyond?), due to exponential recursive learning capabilities.
Very nice article. Waiting for next one.