Ready for Robots?

In this week's survey of what's happening in technology, the focus is on robots. From a driverless car navigating the roads of Berlin to Israeli scientists implanting a mechanical cerebellum into the brain of a rat , we've come a long way from the simple robot vacuums that appeared for consumer use nearly a decade ago, and which looked more like roving CD players than an instance of machine intelligence.

While some people consider the idea of a robot future worrisome, others find only grounds for optimism. As an example of the latter, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil - who wrote The Age of Intelligent Machines, followed by The Age of Spiritual Machines - sees robots as a way of extending and enhancing our own brains. In the Online Q&A for his 2005 book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil claims:

We’ll have both the hardware and software to recreate human intelligence by the end of the 2020s. We’ll be able to improve these methods and harness the speed, memory capabilities, and knowledge-sharing ability of machines.

It's hard to judge the accuracy of Kurzweil's prediction from where we stand now in 2011. Of course, a lot can happen in another ten years. Already robots are taking over the jobs and activities that we don't want to do or can't do ourselves:

• From comforting children and the elderly, as the Paro robot seal was designed to do, to serving as a stealth weapon in war, like the robot BIGDOG;
• From the useful ability to carry heavy bags and packages like an uncomplaining mechanical servant, to the entertainment value of watching robots who know how to dance -
• Even serving as robot representatives of ourselves, i.e., going to meetings, research trips or discussions where we can't be physically present.

  Almost anything seems possible, in technological terms. But a more interesting question to ponder may well be this: if robots represent extensions of our minds into the mechanical realm, what do their form (and function) say about how we first imagine, and then re-create, our most human needs and impulses in non-human form?

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Source: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/show.dml/35947162