These days we sweat over things like bad schools and paying the mortgage. Robot attacks aren't exactly top of mind. After all, we don't have to worry until robots become mobile, get a lot smarter, and self-replicate. Well, start worrying.
In August scientists at Brandeis University in the US announced they had created self-replicating robots. These were little more than crablike plastic gizmos, and they needed a little human help. But they could move around and were about as smart as bacteria. Remember -computer chips were once primitive too.
The Next Big Thing isn't biotech. Or nanotech. It's robotech. First-generation robots have been around for awhile. They weld cars, crawl around the ocean floor and the surface of Mars, help police defuse bombs, spy on enemy troops, and even perform microsurgery. But just wait.
According to Hans Moravec at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, while today's best robots have the intelligence of insects, robot development is blasting along at 10 million times the speed of animal evolution. Moravec gives us 40 or 50 years until robots outsmart us. But they can have a real impact on society well before then.
You can go out right now and buy robot lawn mowers, vacuum cleaners, and dogs. Today, robots are already starting to displace workers like telephone operators, army grunts, bank tellers, postal workers, and inventory gophers. In Japan they're putting plasterers on the street. Are you next?
Don't laugh. A lot of your job is probably pretty routine. Some jobs don't require much thinking at all. Engineers are getting very good at making artificial arms, eyes, ears, and propulsion devices. And we all know how fast computer power is growing. The only thing that lags behind is the software. And batteries.
Moravec sees four generations of technological development before robots surpass humans. The first will happen this decade, with general-purpose robots that run at 1,000 MIPS and have the effective intelligence of reptiles (but "the personality of a washing machine"). The second, a decade later, will produce robots with 300,000-MIPS brains and the abilities of mice. The third, sometime after 2030, will top 10 million MIPS and have a monkeylike understanding of how the world works. Ten years after that, the fourth generation, with 100 million MIPS, will have human-scale intelligence and reasoning.
We may not have to start chanting "Klaatu barada nikto" to fend off Gort-like automata just yet, but once robots smarten up a bit, don't count on job security. Employers like the fact that robots can work 24/7, don't take vacations or join unions, and perform tasks humans can't (like using radar to look inside things, or manipulating heavy or dangerous objects). And as robotics expert Frederik L. Schodt says, humans are "walking filth factories, constantly spewing out hair, particles of skin, and moisture wherever they move, thus contaminating the manufacturing process."
One of the most familiar robots in our culture is R2-D2. Until recently, this cinemabot was run from inside by pint-sized actor Kenny Baker. But this year, in the ultimate irony, George Lucas replaced Baker with a computer.
how long do u think before the robots wise up and kill us like in the terminator and universal soldier surely its possible.