Robots are coming

[Larry$]

My grand parents were Germans from Russia. While I was growing up they lived in what was referred to as Russian bottoms where people spoke mostly German, even in church & the local grocery. I used to understand some of it. I knew when my grandmother got ****** at me she was swearing in 3 languages all mixed together. I didn't know what she was saying, but I knew what she meant. There is a museum here maintaining records of the Germans from Russia. Those areas of town are no longer ethnically different.
My Latvian neighbors have died and been replaced by Ukrainians and Vietnamese. We swap garden produce but language is difficult.

 

[vtcnc]

Last two posts illustrate another thing AI will likely never have as we humans do: shared experience. Good luck programming that!!


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[Chip Hacket]

For those interested - we are roughly 100 years off the origin of the word "robot".

It was first used in a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots", and was brought to the stage in 1921. Here is a link to the play which reads a bit like a short story.

An excerpt from the MIT Reader about the play:

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It's also debatable that Musk and his ilk are either on the cusp of an AI breakthrough or a fool's errand. The old analogy that our brain is something like a computer and we can understand and replicate it by somehow reducing it to data packets - may be limited if not plain wrong. Yet hundreds of billions are being dumped into it while forgetting a couple of fundamental biological facts:

1) our brains are connected to our bodies - without our eyes, ears, nose, tongues and perhaps most often overlooked, our skin - our brains would simply not exist the way that they do. Our senses act as transducers - while we are working on mapping the brain, we may be overlooking how the brain obtains data - if it even is data.

2) a component of our existence is consciousness - and that is something we absolutely cannot explain scientifically. To think that AI can and will be able to imagine something like what it is like to be us is the same thought exercise of us imagining what it is like to be a bat. We simply can't really know what it is like to fly around in the night eating insects and navigating the world using echo-location. Here is a link to that thought experiment.

I really want a robot - like one that finds things for me I can't find and don't have the patience to look for. And self driving cars, or better yet, a self flying commuter vehicle. But I don't want to subscribe to it for fear of it being bricked mid-flight because Big Brother doesn't like my Twitter feed. A lawn-mowing robot is a real thing, but I like making my son mow the lawn for the character building and because I don't want to do it myself, but know that when he is gone, I'll enjoy mowing the lawn just for the sake of doing some work and giving me a chance to reminisce. Is AI superior, or inferior with that kind of thinking?

I used to think androids and AI were possible, but now, I'm not so sure it can be given how mechanized the state of the art is today.

"That’s some interesting stuff you’ve brought up! I agree, there’s a lot to chew on when it comes to AI and robots. I remember reading about Rossum’s Universal Robots and how it got folks thinking about big questions like consciousness and what makes us human. I don’t think we’ll ever fully replicate what it’s like to be a person with AI, but for me, the fun is in the challenge of making robots do useful things. It’s not about taking over human creativity—more about figuring out how to use automation to make life a little easier. My wife is rather sickly and I bought her a robot vacuum cleaner so she could have some help.

Your example of the lawn-mowing robot hit home. Sometimes, it’s just about getting something done without having to think about it, like when you'd rather spend time working on a hobby or something else. Self-driving cars or flying vehicles? I’m all for it, but you’re right—there’s a lot of trust involved before we get there, especially with the whole 'Big Brother' thing.

At the end of the day, the devices I build are just another tool in the shed. They’re not about replacing us, just helping out when we need them. And there will always be a place for the human touch in everything we do, whether it’s making robots or rolling up our sleeves and doing the work ourselves."