Robots and Artificial Intelligence One of the things which has fascinated many of us is robotics and artificial intelligence. I feel we are on the cusp of a breakthrough in at least one of the two fields and maybe both. The big breakthrough in artificial intelligence, known as A.I. may be led by the progress made in quantum computing. The more a computer brain can process and the faster it can do it will have a lot to do with this progress. I have to wonder if we are going down a road we might regret. I say this because maybe we shouldn’t make our machines too smart. Sometimes one of the great inspirations for inventions comes from the minds of the science fiction writers. We hear much about who invented what and yet many of us would like to know where the inspiration for a particular invention came from. Did it just pop into the head of the inventor, or did he or she hear someone talking about what they wished would be invented. Could it be they read a popular science fiction novel or saw a movie or television show and decided one or more of the objects they were using could be invented and went to work trying to develop them? There is no denying Gene Roddenberry was responsible for many ideas for devices. Gene Roddenberry created the show Star Trek in which many ideas for inventions flowed. If he would have been an inventor and could have invented the stuff, he displayed on the television series and movies, we would have been hundreds of years ahead of where we are now. There were some inventions which were based on objects in Star Trek. Take the flip phone for example. It became common place. Other inventions also seem like they were inspired by the show which were tablets, hypo sprays, cloaking devices and even the voice interface for our devices. We still see some engineers and scientists talking about how warp drive would work and I am sure it is being worked on somewhere. Recently it was announced a low power tractor beam was developed which could pull a small macro object using only light. Force fields are constantly being worked on using different plasmas. There were other things which also came to pass which seemed to be featured first on Star Trek such as transparent aluminum, wireless headsets, portable memory, GPS, teleconferencing and more. Robots are making incredible advances in leaps and bounds. We used to think robots had to have a form similar to the human one. Almost all of the old science fiction movies and shows always pictured a robot as a metal human shaped monster. Isaac Asimov, a famous science fiction writer who died in 1992 is responsible for the law of robotics. This law lays out the way a robot should act. The law states: Robots are no longer just being created in the shape of human beings. There is one which was announced which reminds me of the robot in Terminator 2 which could turn to a liquid. It was just announced there is a human shaped robot which was inspired by sea cucumbers and it can shift rapidly between solid and liquid states using magnets. The robots are also able to conduct electricity. The robot has what is known as a soft body. It was developed by a Chinese scientist at the University of Hong Kong. We are quickly heading to a time when robots will be able to fulfill almost all jobs held by humans. Right now, there are industrial robots building cars and other objects. We can see the assembly floor which is huge and yet only two or three people are on that floor while the devices are being built. Years ago, there would have been many hundreds of workers on the floor. Robots are creeping in to the service jobs. While this is just starting, it will gain momentum. There are robot bartenders, fry chefs and yes, even bus robots replacing bus boys. They are the ones who clean up the tables in restaurants. There are also robots entering the home care industry. Robots with a pleasing face, screen and camera are starting to help the elderly. On a request they can connect to a human if a person asks for help. We have been sending robots into the skies and even out into space. Technically, the rovers on Mars are robots, our drones are robots, and even some planes are being built with pilot optional abilities. Are we giving the robots too much power by letting them make so many decisions? Remember we are no longer protected by the three laws of robotics. We have to remember nothing is perfect and there have already been people killed not by military robots although that has happened, but by manufacturing robots. There was a study which came out that studies the amount of deaths by automation per 100,000 workers and it claimed males aged 45 to 54 was 8 and for females of the same age group was 4. While this is not a lot of deaths, it not only doesn’t cover all age groups, but not every industry is automated yet. One death by robot is too much. One man was working near a car assembly robot and was slammed into the wall and died. Nine soldiers died when a robotic cannon malfunctioned in South Africa. A man in a meat packing plant was knocked onto a conveyor belt. Someone forgot to turn off the conveyor belt while the man was doing some construction. Another man in an automobile assembly plant mistakenly got too close to one of the robots which then pinned him against a wheel and suffocated him. Clearly there was not enough safety features built into these machines.
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