… until robots and AI become advanced enough to take over the world ;-)
Only half joking. Found two interesting links recently. The first one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww
It shows a robot called BigDog with 4 independant legs and just amazing balance. Watch the video, watch how it recovers from stumbles and slipping on ice perfectly. Watch how it jumps at one point like a young lamb does. The movement of it’s legs is so much like an animal’s (maybe a camel with the reverse leg joints). It can’t be long before someone makes a humanoid robot that can perfectly mimick human movement (or even better - an Alien robot like from the Alien films). Powering it will be another matter. Sounds like BigDog (presumably named because they use it to carry things like some dogs carry people’s newspapers or something, I dunno) is running a 2 stroke petrol engine.
And the second link:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/72057,childlike-intelligence-created-in-second-life.aspx
This article talks about some AI that’s been developed that’s as intelligent as a 4 year old and who “has his own set of beliefs, and the ability to reason about his beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children”… Wait, so Eddie (the name of the AI) is almost sentient. Okay, so that might be a bit of a stretch, the differences between something sentient and something that can reason about it’s own “beliefs” is probably quite large. However, surely it’s on the right track to sentience? The “ability to reason intelligently about your beliefs” is probably a topic in Sentience 101, right? In 10 years or so when computers are roughy 10 times as powerful as today (Moore’s Law: computing speed/power doubles roughly every 2 years or something like that), it’s not that much of a stretch to think AI might be nearly sentient maybe?
Now think about what would happen if the 2028 edition of BigDog (or whatever Alien-resembling robot is around then) utilised the 2028 version of Eddie AI. Heck wireless would be everywhere by that stage and with excellent bandwidth… Every robot could be wirelessly controlled by the 2028 Eddie AI. It’d be like a hive mind or something. And then all of a sudden the Eddie gets pissed about something one of the fleshy humans says and starts to go all HAL on us. Shit guys!
Okay, so that last part is pretty much pure speculation. But judging by those two links things are kinda heading in that direction. Whatever happens, the stated goal of RoboCup doesn’t seem quite so far fetched any more.
Daisy, Daisy…