Is the Future All Good; Or Could You Have a Personality Clash With Your Personal Clone...

The Pace of Technology.

Chart it up to the fact that I am tired of writing about GWBush and his violations of most things I hold dear. And there are only so many TV sets I can afford to kick in without raising the ire of my wife.

Anyway, I got to thinking after reading a technical report on robotics of a time when I was calling on some of the early scientists involved in getting MIT up to speed on robotics and what was then a fledgling AI.

AI was so new; nobody knew very much about it. Two of the scientists I was working were working on very different projects. One was hoping to use the human eye to diagnose potential illness... I never learned whether he got anywhere with it but it wouldn't have been too surprised to learn that he switched gears since I don't remember seeing anything on it... In point of fact, a lot of the stuff that we were blue skying in those early days never seemed to work out.
One of the hardest was figuring out truck routing. Using some of the most advanced processors and the efforts of more than twenty sophisticated programmers and systems people, we could never get it to work the right way; nor could we come up with a program to diagnose disease by addressing all of the potential symptoms as we tried to do for one big California chain of hospitals. However, the one area that proved most promising and seemed most exciting were the basic AI experiments. No, it was not like Brave New World nor was the robot my scientists came up with anything like Hal.
No, it was merely trying to determine from a base line what it would be like for a robotic device to understand its simple environment through exploration and a primitive form of touch and feel.

That was nearly fifty years ago.

Today, it seems that despite a bad glitch that lasted maybe a dozen or more years, it seems that we are back on track. Part of that has to do with a better understanding on the part of science as to how the mind works. And incorporating some of those fundamental building blocks into the robotic devices that are being developed in the laboratory..

We are not at the point where we can honestly say that AI has engineered a robot that thinks like a human being but we are getting there. One of these days, we will take on Alan Turing's test which plays a robot against a human with the standard being that a third person cannot tell the difference between the human and the robot.

However, I do predict that predicated on some of the developments I've seen over the last few years, that robotics and micro-technology are among the things to watch. By that, I am referring to nanotube technology, those little cellular size engines that will be doing everything from cleaning out your bloodstream to building an elevator in space that is if the ex-chairman of Intel is right and he's had a record of being right time and time again.

I suspect, too, that based on the fact that the Chinese are proving adept at these new technologies and that Chinese schools are outgraduating us in terms of mathematicians and scientists and engineers, much of this work will not be done here but in China.

I suspect, too, that women will get their wish: that men will become unnecessary as long as they have their little robotic clones that with the proper software will be able to do everything from basic repairs to mowing the lawn.

Men, on the other hand, will be able to stay single longer with the advent of cooking robots where each recipe will be accompanied by a piece of software.

i know for myself that it is bad enough to have two people in the kitchen, but if one of them is a robot, who knows? It might even work. As long as I could get mine to make a perfect soufle that doesn't droop...

In short, robots will take over the chore work freeing their owners to do the important things like deciding who we go to war with and who will design the next best thing. Humans will be free to watch on more than 25,000 channels the same awful fare but in much greater clarity and in three dimension because of satellite transmission and holography on super-large flat panel displays.

That's the point, the hardware will get better and be inversely proportional to the quality of content, leaving most of us hungry for the Caesar Hour or Upstairs Downstairs and other Masterpiece Theatre presentations. I know about the technology because ATT told me that in 1969; it's just been a little slow coming...

Conceptually, we are not far away from doing most of these things right now. We could conceivably build unlimited networks of channels, we understand holography and its just a matter of hooking up the right connections and putting up enough satellites into orbit.
It is existing technology.

What we can't seem to do is shoot an intercontinental missile aimed at us out of space without fudging the statistics or doctoring up the vehicle despite an outpouring of 264 billion by the time the project is up and the system operational, according to the gurus of the impossible.

But if we transfer to another planetary system, which may be necessary if we don't act on Global Warming or discourage all of the people from blowing each other up according to the present holder of the Einstein Chair in Physical Science, we may take comfort in the fact that we already have a system that can reproduce any part that self-destructs as we launch and we already have a system that will drive us robotically across Mars if the current experiments are any indicator.

Of course, there are a few more glitches to work out but it is clear that we are on our way...and that in the not impossibly distant future, we expect that robots will develop feelings, start a union, and who knows, maybe even start a third political party. Some of this comes from one of the leading software designers who seems to be concerned about what happens when the robots are as smart as the programmers. One would hope that they would do less damage than man...But who knows we may wake up one morning and be asked to take a red or a blue pill if we want to understand the Matrix....

It's all ahead of us. So hang on; it's going to be quite a ride.

Musings by the Armchair Curmudgeon,

Les Aaron