Dreams and nightmare of robotics

Imagine a world in which humans are part robot and robots are part human, where biology and machine have collided to create a nation of cyborgs and machine intelligence has become dominant. It's a fantasy, far enough away to seem unlikely to happen in our lifetime yet close enough to draw the taste of dreams and nightmare.
The dream of robotics is first that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of leisure, restoring us to Eden. The second dream of robotics is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality.

• Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist, share the vision that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology.

• Hans Moravec, a computer scientist and roboticists, stated in his articles “The age of robots”, that growing computer power over the next half-century will produce robots that learn like mammals, model their world like primates and eventually reason like humans. Humanity then will have produced a worthy successor. Even if they wipe out humanity, they represent a higher form of evolution that we should be proud to usher in.

• Kevin Warwick, who has spent his career working on robotics, creating machine intelligence at the department of cybernetics at the University of Reading in England, has implanted an electronics-filled glass capsule under the skin of his arm in order to remotely control his computer. Warwick is now developing an even more complex implant project -- he is planning to hard-wire his brain directly to his computer. He warned that our ability to be cyborgs, he warns, might save the human race if the worst possible scenario -- the "Matrix" future -- comes true.

• Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis, who hopes to be known as the Father of the Artificial Brain, believe that 21st century technologies will allow the creation of "artilects" (artificial intellects, artificial intelligences, massively intelligent machines), with intellectual capacities many times greater than those of human beings.

The fear of robotics is that our own creations will eventually become a curse to humanity threatening our existence. Because of their superior nature, we will never be able to revolt again and become sub-class creature. Science fiction, starting from Rossum and Frankenstein, has long been at work on scenarios of robots that evolve and manufacture ever-improving versions of themselves, and eventually develop human traits - the capacity to feel, to love, to hate and eventually wiped out their creator.

• Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, warned that our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species. In a recent Wired magazine article “why the future doesn’t need us”, Bill Joy argued that if the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, as it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave, the fate of human race will be at the mercy of the machines.

source : http:/robonyp.8m.com