When Will the Robots Take Over?

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema

The robots might have taken over already. There’s enough artificial intelligence out there to write this blog without human intervention. Computers can already beat chess masters by brute computational force. And look! Google Translate can change this into Norwegian: Google oversetter kan oversette denne bloggen. Vel, I kan probably måken thaten up mysefen withouten any programvare. But anyway …

For a ReelzChannel segment we did recently, we interviewed Dan Burrus, the author of Technotrends. He made this somewhat scary point about texting: When we text on our phones we have adopted a machine language, behaving more like tippy-tappy automatons than talky, expressive people. Maybe, click by click, we’re edging closer to world robotic domination. But maybe not. Machines need us to type because they’re still too dumb to understand us when we talk – try saying “radio on” to the voice-actuated thingie in your car and it will likely respond “ejector seat ready – prepare to exit.”

Voice recognition glitches aside, robots are trying to do more than ever. Dr. Monika Hagen thinks robots should be able to heal us. She’s been researching robotic surgery at the University of California, San Diego.

“The field is exploding. More and more robots are being sold and more and more procedures are being performed with these robots.” — Dr. Monika Hagen.

Dr. Hagen is developing procedures like minimally invasive abdominal surgery. You move controllers that look suspiciously like a video game and the robot makes the cuts. Don’t try this at home – you do need training.

If you want to worry about something, try this: Robots are already learning how to build themselves. How long before they build very sophisticated versions of themselves – enough to become self aware? When a computer becomes aware of itself you could say it achieves consciousness. After that happens, what’s the only difference between you and your laptop? A soul. When machines become self aware it will likely push us toward forging a new definition of the soul and a new quest for scientific proof that it exists uniquely in humans.

Remember the movie “21 Grams?” The title comes from the belief that the body loses 21 grams as the soul leaves the body. The number comes from research conducted in 1907 by Dr. Duncan MacDougall. He made a special bed built upon scales. He placed patients who were dying on it and measured what happened when they expired. Unfortunately, his results were wildly inconsistent – only one of his six test subjects lost 21 grams at death. But people want to believe in the soul – so much so that they want to believe it has an actual, measurable weight. It’s not very scientific, but it is poetic and intensely human. It will be a long time before any machine comes up with a belief system like that.

Or as we say in Norwegian, Det vil være en lang tid før maskinen kommer opp med en tro systemet sånn. (Thanks, Google Translator.)

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