Eh, maybe high-quality machine translation is ten years away, but we have Babelfish and its kin right now. And decades ago when people said that machine translation was ten years away, those folks would have been satisfied with Babelfish.
See the"Darpa Grand Challenge" to get an idea how close it is.
Exactly. A LASIK system is a medical robot that reshapes the eye far more effectively than any human surgeon.
I’m astounded by how little awareness most people have of how many elements of our everyday lives are basically “robotic” and would astonish a SF writer of the 1930s. An “ecommerce” web site is, for all practical purposes, a robotic salesperson. No, it does not look like a humaniform robot, and it requires the customer to use a keyboard and mouse, but it replaces a human saleperson.
Then again, an e-commerce web site also bears a strong resemblance to the Sears-Roebuck catalog, and nobody would claim that that was a robot.
The Sears-Roebuck catalog was an extension of their traditional stores, basically a very extensive front window. The orders were taken by human beings, payment accepted by human beings and delivered by human beings.
But a song purchased from iTunes requires no human interaction other than the purchaser. In the case of an independent artist, the song and album artwork is uploaded by the artist and until the purchaser hears it not one additional person has to be involved.
How is that like a Sears-Roebuck catalog?
The transition to electronic commerce has wiped out the retail record store - and all the jobs that were associated with them in shipping and warehousing.
I believe that there will be artificial human like robots by the 22nd Century. Science know in theory that it is possible, but there are things that must be worked out and discovered first. I think a lot in science is having to discover something that it a tool to discover something else that finds the solution of a problem.
The invention of the television is a good example. In 1884, an inventor created a component of projecting film called a scanning disc. But it took another inventor to discover how to be able to project an image to a screen by 1927. This is the story…
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/television.htm
Science is very close on creating a robot that can walk. Not like a human quite yet, but almost there.
I think the robotics industry would be a good stock investment.
Actually walking robots are very much a reality today. Check out the video of Big Dog I put up above, not only can the robot walk, in some respects it is superior to the average human being; there are few humans who could have maintained their balance in the ice like Big Dog did. If you want a more conventional looking walking robot there Asimoby Honda.
To use the TV analogy I think we are already in 1927 where working prototypes of fairly sophisticated human-like robots are available. But the TV industry didn’t take off till the late 40’s when TV sets became affordable for the average family and the big broadcasters created programming that they actually wanted to watch. That’s what I expect to happen in the next few decades.
Actually, a computer passing a Turing test doesn’t prove the existence of AI. It only proves that intelligence is not required to accomplish the effective equivalent of a conversation.
No, the point of the Turing Test is that if we declare that a computer program that can carry on a wide-ranging conversation with a human being without being detected isn’t “really” conscious, then we might as well say that human beings aren’t really conscious either.
I’d be willing to bet that there will be autonomous humanoid robots in the future, but I’d also be willing to bet that the humaniod robots will be outnumbered by several orders of magnitude by nonhumanoid robots. And that there will be many automated tasks that will be done by machines, but these machiens won’t be very “robotlike”. The dishwasher is a perfect example. We could build a humanoid robot that can pick up a plate, scrub it with a sponge, inspect it to make sure it’s clean, rinse it off, and put it in a drying rack. Or we could build a dishwasher that does the exact same job, but does it in a different way than a human being or a humanoid robot would do.
It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to build a robot that washes dishes in the same way a human being would. But it’s pretty easy to build a machine that washes dishes. So lots of tasks that we imagine will take strong AI actually don’t–with a little thought we can get the job done in a way that doesn’t require thought. We don’t need robots to carry letters from house to house if we have email instead.
In addition to Lantern’s links I thought I’d add one to a documentary movie from Honda called Living With Robots. Has interviews with professors, fiction writers (ok Star Trek/Transformers) and scientists currently working on Asimo and other Honda developments including: The Walk Assist
Lots of information on how robots are changing our lives from Search and Rescue applications to Asimo, the robot servant.
What test would you propose?
OK, with iTunes you have a point. I was thinking of something more like Amazon, where (so far as I know) you still have humans going into the warehouses, taking books off of shelves, and putting them into boxes.
I wouldn’t trust any kid not old enough to figure out that the cat shouldn’t be in the dishwasher to load it. And if sounding an alarm when you don’t understand something marks intelligence, then Windows is intelligent, as are most of the Perl scripts I write.
And if the book you buy from Amazon goes into your Kindle? Of the DVD you get from NetFlix is instant watch? For all I know NetFlix DVDs might be robotically selected already. And from the point of view of the consumer, whether a person or robot selects your book is impossible to determine.
BTW most mail is now sorted robotically, at least to the zip code level. I’d guess that it is sorted to the house level - when I subbed as a carrier 40 years ago they didn’t let me sort mail to that level since it probably would have taken me, new to the route, all day. Machine sorting would be a gigantic cost savings.
This is it. If you have a system that can do the job mechanically, why build a redundant system to do it, especially because they mechanical system is now pretty much always controlled by computer anyway. The old sf writers thought in terms of mainframes, and getting a computer down to skull size was as far as they could go. Having the computer as small as they are now was hard to imagine.
In fact, hard AI might be built into these machines, but see “Naught for Hire” by John Stith in an Analog some time back for a funny take on how this could go wrong.
Amazon’s system is as robotized as they can make it right now. I can’t find anything specific to them, but here is a video of the current state of the art in order picking. For the most commonly ordered items, like the new Stieg Larsson book, I have no doubt that they arrive at Amazon’s warehouse already packaged in their own shipping boxes. Only the least commonly ordered items are actually picked by hand off of a shelf.
I’ve seen footage of NetFlix’s system. The DVDs are handled in those bar-coded sleeves and, strange as it may seem, every single DVD and BluRay they have in their system is scanned every single day. The returning envelopes are automatically slit open. If the customer has indicated a problem, the disc is routed to a human inspector. Otherwise, it gets stacked into a bin to be scanned. If it is on someone’s order queue, it gets put into an envelope, addressed and bar coded and put into the correct outgoing bin for the Post Office. If a particular film is not going out the same day, it remains in the bin to be scanned again the next day.
The USPS has done the most advanced work in handwriting recognition.
NetFlix pre-sorts all their outgoing items to the Plus4 level.
OK, I guess I was out of date on Amazon, then. It’s still been an incremental progression, for the most part, though. At some point between the Sears catalog and no humans at all being involved (which Amazon still isn’t quite at), it became what might be called a robotic system, but where exactly?
Of course, this is probably precisely the point others are making, that we won’t recognize the robots that transform our lives as “robots”.
I’m not sure that there is one. Similarly, there’s no test to see if one is a grandmaster chess player or simply following a list of instructions. I can imagine a person given a schematic (and phone-book-thick) equivalent of the Deep Blue program and beating Garry Kasparov, assuming we’re okay with it taking a year or more for the person to make a move, and even if the person has no previous knowledge of chess.
As an idle thought, I’d guess I’d be most impressed when a computerized conversation program shows little patience for bullshit, i.e. it has evolving algorithms for spotting nonsense that the human is feeding it, and not just obvious gibberish, either.
Why do you say you’d be most impressed when a computerized conversation programshows little patience for bullshit?
Touché. I guess I’d just really like to see a religious person explaining his views to a computer and have the computer listen politely for a while before responding with “Yeah, you realize that’s insane, right?”
My point is that Amazon employs as few human beings as possible, and only for work that someone has yet to create a robot for. Humans, for order picking, have two advantages over robots. The first is that the human hand has greater dexterity than any current robot hand. And the human vision system can direct the human hand more accurately than any current robotic vision system can direct any robot hand.
How far away is it?Here is a video of a robot that can take a pile of towels, pick up one, find the corners, fold it and stack the pile. This is current technology. At this point, it is far slower than a human being. But the limitations in speed are because this is a research project. Optimized software, combined with a high-speed robotics like this hand, will result in equipment that will rapidly exceed any human.
If that technology were available in a form that would allow it to operate in the same space as a human being, do you think Amazon would hesitate to buy them and fire as many people as they could?
Exactly. A lot of people seem to be fixated on the idea that human shaped robots are the only “real” robots. But if we use Douglas Adam’s definition “a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man”, it’s clear that we interact with robotic systems on a daily basis. An ATM is a robotic bank teller - it does the job a teller did. iTunes does the job a record store employee did.