The worlds depicted by science fiction writers could be closer to fact then fiction. A sudden surge of research - and limited successes - in the fields of cybernetics, artificial intelligence and robotics promise to deliver a revolution in the way we live our lives. However, some feel the age of the robot could end the human species.
Toy manufacturers have typically driven the robotics industry, with robotic toys making their debut over a century ago, and growing in popularity since. The huge success of the Furbie - a cute little animal packed with sensors that had to be tended to and fed or it died - has inspired companies like Mattel to invest serious capital in creating bigger, better and more realistic toys with intelligence, sensors and the ability to learn.
A slew of realistic robotic babies are set to hit the market before Christmas, with one model capable of growth and the ability to learn to walk over time. Another features realistic facial expressions, baby talk that eventually develops into English, and nappies that need to be changed. One engineer admitted to feeding his prototype when it cried rather than just switching it off, due to the emotion that the realistic replica provoked.
A slew of realistic robotic babies are set to hit the market before Christmas, with one model capable of growth and the ability to learn to walk over time.
Jason Norwood-Young, technology editor, ITWeb
Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading in the UK, has created quite a stir in the scientific community for both his experiments on his own body for the sake of cybernetics, and for his doom-and-gloom predictions that robots could sound a death knoll for the human race.
In August 1998, he became famous for planting a chip inside his body that tracked him around his university department, opening doors before he got to them, switching lights on and off for him, and saying "hello" to him at the entrance when he arrived in the morning.
Warwick does not intend to stop there - his next implant will wrap around the nerve fibres in his left arm, and feed impulses directly into his brain, as well as record nerve activities. Some of the possibilities for the experiment include the recording and playback of movement, pain, thoughts and emotions. If he is happy, Warwick will record the emotion and play it back when he is sad, resulting in a little "upper", he hopes. He also intends to get drunk and see if he can recreate the emotion a few days later with the aid of his implant.
If this strange experiment is successful, Warwick plans to implant his wife with a similar device, and fly to New York while she remains in the UK. The two will try to share movement and emotion with each other over the Internet.
One of Warwick`s justifications for the experiment is that machines of the future may be smarter than humans, and even hold more power than us.
Social robots
MIT university is actively developing social robots, equipped with both artificial intelligence and a body to explore their world and interact with humans. The robot Kismet is capable of displaying emotion dependent on "a variety of natural social cues from visual and auditory channels", according to MIT. Another robot from MIT is Cog, designed to prove the hypothesis that humanoid intelligence requires humanoid interactions with the world.
Numerous other robots are currently being designed, tackling the problem of creating life from different angles. Some are starting to use the Internet community to help "teach" artificial intelligence engines. Neural networks are also expected to grow in complexity, with researcher Hugo de Garis of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Lab in Kyoto, Japan, trying to connect huge numbers of neural net modules together to simulate the brain of a cat.
Not all of this robotics and cybernetic stuff is fiction. Warwick`s robotic cat was recently denied a seat on a British Airways flight as BA staff classed it as an animal and insisted it travelled in the hold. A stroke patient was implanted with a transmitting device in Atlanta, allowing him to move a cursor on a computer screen by thought alone. Rats have had success with implants too, and a group of cyber-rats at the MCP Hahnemann School of Medicine in Philadelphia now merely have to think about pressing a lever to receive food.
Whether robots taking over the world is science fiction or fact remains a hot debate, but with so many out to prove the point one way or another, we will no doubt benefit from some excellent research in this field until such time as the computers can take all this difficult thinking off our minds.
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