Monday, August 15, 2005

Are terminators the future or are they here today?

Today there are military robots, drones, pilotless aircraft, robot sentries, and even bomb robots in use by the military and civilian police forces. These machines are clearly the first step on the path to what is depicted in the Terminator movies. The Talon military robot has been in use since 2000, and we have all seen Honda's Osimo human shaped walking robot.

http://www.gizmohighway.com/robotics/talon_robot.htm
http://www.gizmohighway.com/robotics/asimo.htm

Now a Japanese scientist has created an extremely early version of a human looking android. Ironic that he chose to make the first one female since females are the more vicious gender of the human species. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4714135.stm

At least in the terminator movies the female came later and not at first :)

And of course the illustrious DARPA has been working seriously, along with many educational institutions, on creating true artificial intelligence.

"DARPA spends $29 million per year on its Perceptive Assistant That Learns program, which develops robots programmed to think. The agency and its contractors will first develop an architecture that considers reasoning, learning, perception, language and action for robots, he said." http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0419/feat-brachman-04-19-04.asp

Many of the most wonderful and the most destructive human capabilities have come about in very similar ways. Little pieces worked on by separate endeavors that when brought together become dangerous to man kind. I doubt Einstein thought much about his calculations and I doubt the people that contributed to the creation of "conventional explosives" saw the potential for them to light off an atomic bomb. But bring together the knowledge of many areas and we create the scariest explosive device known to man.

What will happen when we bring together all of the work to create terminators or have we already and we just don't know it yet?

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