Yesterday we were human, today we're robots.

Today we are seeing an ever closer connection between humans and digital technology. Previous blogs consider the ideas of human and technology intimacy in our bodies, but what about our minds?
We think all day, every day about life, people, relationships, music, what we'll have for dinner, everything goes around our minds constantly but what about machines? Would you believe that they think too?
The possibility of a machine actually thinking sounds bizarre for they are programmed, so everything they do is controlled but is it? 


Alex Turing invented the 'Turing test' to discover whether machines could think. The test involves a judge who must determine who is the human and who is the machine. All the participants are separated and if the judge cannot tell the computer from human then, the computer has passed the test.

Hal 9000 '2001, A Space Odyssey' was the artificial intelligence in a series that could control systems, and interact with humans. This may have been a fictional character but many people had theories believing this would be the future of computing. 

"Machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do" - Herbert. A. Simon, Carnegie Mellon University.

The films idea of this technology was too optimistic, having lip reading and commonsense was still fiction, although we do have the advances of voice recognition on smartphones.
Similarly to Hal, there is the known computer program called 'Chatterbot' to provide intelligent    conversation with human uses by audio or text. 

"The development of an artificially conscious entity may happen without our lifetimes" Robert Pepperall, 2003 

So, what is a robot?
When the word robot comes to mind, what do we picture?
A machine moving around in a laboratory or factory? 
A computer?
A mechanical man? Woman? or dog? 
Data from Star Trek? 
All of them. 
We have industrial robots who use a mechanical limb to move about. They perform repetitive tasks that humans can do and some that are too dangerous for humans. Robots are being blamed for unemployment in industries as they are replacing workers. 
They can be used for war, fighting purposes for bomb disposal and marines fighting platforms.
Although being used for these series tasks, they are also used for entertainment. Robot Wars was the television series where individuals would create their own robots to fight others. 
There are also 'expressive robots'. Rodney Brookes created 'Baxter' a robot who can interact with human workers in industrial tasks. 

There are many films that involve the development of robots; 

• The American film 'Short Circuit', 1986. 'Johnny Five' was a realistic approach of a robot who was 'alive'. 
• Data (Star Trek) the fictional android with amazing computing intelligence with aspects of human behaviour. 
• The Terminator, 1984, a cyborg assassin programmed to exterminate the human race, Although being an assassin robot Arnold Schwarzenegger is idealized by men.
• WALL.E, 2008, Disney Pixar prediction of our future.

We do not know what will occur in the future, we can only predict. Robots are an important part of our lives, without the machines certain tasks would not get done. Whether or not machines can actually think for themselves is always going to be questioned. We could ask ourselves if it is really us who are thinking and not someone else controlling our thoughts, so are we machines? 


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/startups/2012/10/rodney-brooks-rethink-robotics-elderly.html?page=all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwBmPiOmEGQ
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/ai/turing.html