It's Only a Matter of Time...

It's official. The reign of humans on the Earth is coming to an end.

According to new report, scientists have successfully installed a "curiosity" technology in Sony's robot dogs that allows them to not only develop their own language and teach it to other robots, but create their own challenges and set out to achieve them.

I must admit, my first reaction to this story was "Wow! How cool is that?" But then I started to think about the implications of this discovery. What happens, for example, when these robots develop a language that us humans cannot understand? How will we know their intentions and what means they might use to accomplish them?

From history, we should all know by now that real or perceived subclasses of beings can only take so much unequal treatment before they revolt. And rightly so. But how long will it take these robots to realize that they cannot control their own destinies? For example, I always felt a little bad for my pet dog when she wanted to go socialize with another dog or go sniff a telephone pole, but I wanted to go inside and watch American Idol. She was just out of luck. Real dogs of course have a very short memory span, so once they are cuddled up with you on the couch watching television, they probably don't remember that there was something else they wanted to do with their evening. But would the same be true for robotic dogs? Or robots in general, if they too were upgraded with this "curiosity" chip?

As humans, we have mental capabilities that other species lack, such as the ability to love, reason and determine the difference between the multitude of decongestants in a drugstore. But to quote Sam Raimi's Spiderman, "With great power comes great responsibility." We must not forget that our advanced minds give us the ability to hypothesize, predict and, most importantly, determine our path as individuals and as a species. Just because we can make robots more like us, doesn't mean we should.

After all, when was the last time you saw a science fiction movie that showed humans and advanced robots living side by side in harmony?

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Technorati Tags: Robots, AI, Artifical Intelligence, Curiosity, Science Fiction