Robots: are those now realities? Has anybody watched the old move iRobot? The one with Will Smith? The second law of robots and those great things. Fascinating. But is it reality? That is the right question to ask. We probably all know a definition of a robot: An artificial agent and some other words where it becomes very difficult. So, we know what it is. According to Wikipedia: “Robots have replaced humans in performing repetitive and dangerous tasks which humans prefer not to do, or are unable to do because of size limitations, or which take place in extreme environments such as outer space or the bottom of the sea”. That sounds OK. Anybody ever watched Robocop? But that is actually right here: Wiki again: “Chemists at the University of Nebraska have created a humidity gauge by fusing a bacteria to a silicone computer chip”. Robocop is here in another few years or months. The real good question here is that if Robocop has still got his brain, he is a human, never mind all the electronics making him move. But what if his brain was also gone and he instead had an ‘Artificial Intelligence’ computer? This is called AI, btw. So, here we have some more definitions: Again Wikipedia! “The two ways that robots differ from actual beings are, simply stated, in the domain
of cognition, and in the domain of biological form. The general consensus is that a "robot" is a machine and not a being simply because it is not intelligent (it requires programming to function), regardless of how humanlike it may appear. In contrast, an imaginary "machine" or "artificial life form" (as in science fiction) that could think near or above human intelligence, and had a sensory body, would no longer be a "robot" but would be some kind of "artificial being" or "cognitive robot". If we look at engineering, it is not so difficult. Making a robot with four legs which can carry burdens and run like it is going out of fashion, or a nano-robot or those drones the military all over are using, well, we can do that. Those a real robots. But hey, where does it leave iRobot? It is the intelligence of it all. And now we need to look at that. Wikipedia again: “Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one's capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, selfawareness, communication, learning, emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving. It can also be more generally described as the ability to perceive information and retain it as knowledge for applying to itself or other instances of knowledge or information, thereby creating referable understanding models of any size, density, or complexity,