I just saw, for once more, the big blockbuster iRobot. The idea of inteligent robots and evolving artificial inteligence has always fascinated me. I mean the idea of creating something that can immitate human and the human behaviour is a big thing by its self. Think about creating a “machine” that can pass the Turing test. All in all it says that if we put a human behind a door and a computer behind another one, both aim to convince they are the other, and we ask questions to them can we tell one from another? Imagine a machine that can pass this test…
A couple of years ago, i was interested in chatbots, that is bots that are designated for chatting with humans. The most inteligent bot in this category is ALICE (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity). A small chat log follows:
Human: my name is stratos
ALICE: Nice to meet you, stratos.
Human: whats ur name?
ALICE: My name is ALICE.
Human: where are you from?
ALICE: I am originally from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Now I live in Oakland, California. Where are you?
Human: what is your age?
ALICE: I am 11 of your Earth years.
As you can see it is pretty inteligent. In fact, in trivial questions it is inteligent enough to fool someone who does not know what is hiding behind the wall…
Imagine this. Put this kind of inteligence in a machine that can pretty much immitate human movements or even become human-like. Is it still a “machine”? Some might answer yes. Then the question evolves. What defines a human beeing? I mean, if we are able to create something that can think and move like a human then what is left? Well, most of you would say soul, feelings, thoughts. It is partly true. And here comes the movie. What if we make a robot like sonny, the one that had inteligence, human-like appearance and finally, thoughts and feelings. Would we be able to say we created a human? Nope. I am pretty sure not. So what defines a human?
Well my penny’s worth of thought is that we will never create a human but the future holds many many secrets. Anybody saying that the kind of movies like iRobot, or A.I. are just fiction i think is just keeping the truth from himself. Why am i so sure? Well if we took someone from the 50’s and told him, “hey in 50 years you will be able to talk on the phone while moving, read anyone’s thoughts, view videos on demand” etc etc wouldn’t he think of us just what you think about the writers of the movies?
So what am i trying to say? Well, are you afraid of the future? Do you think we should stop evolving A.I. just because there is a chance of beeing used wrong? My vote goes to “evolve and go forth no matter what”. Just because a knife can be used as a murder weapon that doesn’t mean we should stop making knifes! Well, vote on the poll and leave a comment of what you think…
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