The Age of Robots is Almost Upon Us Many of us might not be giving this much thought, but robots are rapidly creeping into our lives. The ones we see right now are usually more like cooking devices, large arm shaped devices in factories putting parts in place, or far simpler ones which look like a small television screen, but answer our questions. Not everyone might agree an Alexa device is a robot, but I think we loosely have to apply that title to it. When I was a kid and used to read comic books, that was a long time ago, all robots were pictured as having a roughly human form. No one would picture them like the new White Castle burger making robot stove. While I don’t think this is some evil robot plan to not look like us before they take over the world secretly, I do think robots are making deeper inroads into our society than we realize. For those of you who like to have a few drinks to relax and tell the bartender your problems, those days are numbered. It is not that you won’t be able to get the drinks, it is just the bartender will be one of those new robotic bartender models and I don’t think it might be too sympathetic even if it makes believe it is. There has been a lot of progress made on robotic brains. In 2021 NVIDIA announced a new robotic brain which was 6 times more powerful than their current one and was small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. They claim, the brain named Orin can perform 200 trillion operations per second. The human one is capable of making 15 quintillion operations per second. While it is said the most powerful robot brain of all is here that brain is 30 times less powerful than the average human brain, but it is gaining on us. Some scientists are working on artificial neural networks which work similar to a human brain, while still not as powerful. Not all Artificial brains are small enough to get into a robotic shell. One of the most powerful was said to be the GPT-3. It is capable of learning just from a few examples. When it learned how to create news articles and they were judged, the margin the judges distinguished the AI news articles from human written ones was only 3 percent. There are those who believe we will be sending robots who look similar to humans in shape and function to the stars someday in place of human astronauts. They have come to this idea by studying all the dangers to us in a long space flight. I think they will have their uses such as in repairing damage on the outside of a ship or space station. As far as being a replacement for a human astronaut, we will have to see how much we progress in space travel. What I mean by this is who knows what we may be able to solve over the years? The way technology is advancing, we might eventually solve all our problems. There is a trend in some Asian countries to create friendly looking robots to help the elderly with medicine deliveries, and other mundane tasks. The biggest task it seems to me are the elderly, who are lonely, and they seem to look forward to the visit from the robot and almost seem to regard it as company. If people feel this way now, imagine how they will feel when the robots get more human like. An artificial skin is said to have been developed which looks a lot like human skin. There are already crude human looking robots that look human when not moving. I say when not moving, because the movement seems jerky and not human like yet, although they are getting better. Then there is the creepy fact no one talks about yet. That is the robot can be made to look like anybody. This means scientists can use a photo of a lost relative to create the robot’s features, if the owner wants that. Will the invention of quantum computers allow robots to get more human like in the future? If scientists can get the quantum computer down to a small enough size which will operate at a wider range of temperatures, and it can be installed into a robot, I worry they might be able to process at such speeds they will be able to out think us. The quantum computers have an advantage over the legacy computers. Legacy computers only have two states they use, and that is on and off, which are expressed with 0s and 1s. What makes the quantum computer so powerful is the fact it has three states, and it is something our brains can’t really understand. It is on, off, and on and off at the same time. It might turn out we will be giving birth to a new species of beings who can pass the test of being sentient. There have been a few movies over the years which though science fiction, show robot revolutions against humans. One has to wonder if this ever could happen. We might have to be on guard against making our machines too smart. This might sound silly right now, but in the future this could all change. The military has already adopted to the idea of using robots and has been using remote controlled robots everywhere. While some are still very primitive, such as those which look like tiny tanks and sport a machine gun and camera, which they send into a building first to clear it out. Then there are the drones planes and drone ships, and other weapons. The military is working on robotic devices which can make the decisions themselves on whether to fire at someone or not. I am not very happy about that. I know how many times over the years I have had computer problems and things didn’t go the way I wanted, but the result was no one was killed. The newest military planes are being made where they can fly with a pilot at the controls, or they can become a drone. One has to wonder if taking the humans out of the war decision will make war easier to launch? If a country has mostly a robotic army for example, would the idea they didn’t have many of their soldiers at risk spur them on to attack? It turns out robots can be used for good but they also have the capability of having a dark side, either put there on purpose, or by some sort of computer error.
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