Will Robots Ever Take Over The World - Essay Example

Will Robots Take Over the World?May 13, 2009IntroductionThis paper sets out to investigate the question on whether it is possible or not for the machines to take over the human race. It will seek to analyze the current state of robotics by reviewing the suggested articles and analyzing them, it will try to point out what the present day robots can do and will try to expose their limitations. It will also analyze the prerequisites for a robot revolt, i.e. what technical capabilities should robots have and possibly find out the motive for such a revolt, compare them to the current state of things in robotics, analyze, discuss and then provide a conclusion.

InvestigationThe problem of robots taking over the world has been an issue for many scholars. This topic has been hotly disputed for decades, discussion of it can be found in the Internet, in popular scientific journals, in various books, publications etc., and yet, there is no clear point that would be accepted by everyone. The first attempts were made to limit, if not ban, development of robotics and AI in 1958, 1980 and in 1999 [Malcolm, 2000]. The main reason behind the fear of machines is coming out of the rapidly developing technology, the processing ability of which, according to Moore’s law, will inevitably exceed that of humans.

This statement is readily disputable, in the first place because the computing capability of a human brain has not been fully calculated and therefore there is no chance of establishing point for comparison, and also predicting the time when computers will ‘overgrow’ humans. This question can be only discussed with a certain approximation, where the time frame being voiced is 50 years. It also seems that there is no unanimity on this question due to the fact that the question has been posted using a rather vague, blurry formulation.

First of all, how do we define a ‘robot’? Joanna Bryson [2004] seems to exclude AI and nano technology from the family of robots. I believe excluding the newly discovered and so much promising fields of robotics is incorrect. If we define robots as ‘artefacts we construct’ [Bryson, 2004], then AI and nano technology should be also included into this ‘umbrella’ of terms. Second, what time frame are we looking at when raising this issue? Ten, twenty or two hundred years? Currently robot overrule seems to be impossible, however even Pentium I, which is now considered to be obsolete, was a product of wild imagination of a sci-fi writer some 150 years ago.

These are at least the two issues, which need to be defined properly in order to answer this question. In this paper we will assume that a ‘robot’ is an artificial product, which is capable of functioning relatively independently; it is assumed that it can perform a function or a number of functions; we will also assume that to the robot family also belong AI and nano technology. I will also assume that the answer given to this questions is based on the analysis of current state of technology, where new revolutionary (here: those, allowing to take over the world) inventions are unlikely to be made within the next 10 years.