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The Universal Robot
| Article
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20224 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
4,406 Words |
| Author
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Hans Moravec
Hans Moravec is senior research scientist and director of
the Mobile Robotics Laboratory of the Robotics Institute at
Carnegie Mellon University. He has been building robots for
over 25 years. |
Instincts regarding the nature and quantity of work we enjoy probably evolved during the 100,000 years our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers. Less than 10,000 years ago the agricultural revolution made life more stable, and richer in goods and information. But, paradoxically, it requires more human labor to support an agricultural society than to live in a primitive one, and the work is of a different, "unnatural," kind, out of step with the old instincts. The effort to avoid it has resulted in the domestication of animals, slavery, and the Industrial Revolution. Many jobs must still be done by hand, engendering for hundreds of years the fantasy of an intelligent but soulless being that can tirelessly dispatch the drudgery.
But only in this century have electronic sensors and computers given machines the ability to sense their world and to think about it, and so offered a way to fulfill the wish. As in fables, the side effects are likely to dominate the resulting story. Most significantly, these perfect slaves will continue to develop, and will not long remain soulless. As they increase in competence they will have occasion to make more and more autonomous decisions, and so will slowly develop a volition and purposes of their own. At the same time they will become indispensable. Our minds evolved to store the skills and memories of a Stone Age life, not the enormous complexity that has developed in the last 10,000 years. We've kept up, after a fashion, through a series of social inventions--social stratification and division of labor, memory aids like poetry and schooling, written records stored outside the body, and recently machines that can do some of our thinking entirely without us. The portion of absolutely essential human activity that takes place outside of human bodies and minds has been steadily increasing. Hardworking intelligent machines may complete the trend.
Serious attempts to build thinking machines began after the Second World War. One line of research, called cybernetics, used simple electronic circuitry to mimic small nervous systems, and produced machines that could learn to recognize simple patterns, and turtlelike robots that found their way to lighted recharging hutches. An entirely different approach, named artificial intelligence (AI), attempted to duplicate rational human thought in the large computers that appeared after the war, and by 1965 had demonstrated programs that proved theorems in logic and geometry, solved calculus problems, and played good games of checkers. In the early1970s. AI research groups at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University attached television cameras and robot arms to their computers, so their "thinking" programs could begin
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