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Limits to creativity

Fri, 02/08/2008 - 18:10 — NLN

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says the day is far away when robots can do entire tasks on their own. "What is intelligence?" Apple's co-founder asked an audience of about 550 Thursday at the Houston area's first Up Experience conference in Stafford. His answer? A robot that could get him a cup of coffee.

"You can come into my house and make a cup of coffee and I can go into your house and make a cup of coffee," he said. "Imagine what it would take for a robot to do that. It would have to negotiate the home, identify the coffee machine and know how it works. But that is not something a machine is capable of learning -- at least not in my lifetime," added Wozniak, who rolled onto the stage on his ever-present Segway before delivering a rapid-fire speech on robotics, his vision of robots in classrooms and the long haul ahead for artificial intelligence.

Read full story in The Houston Chronicle.


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Comments

Sat, 02/09/2008 - 08:50 — quantum_flux

On the Ethics of AI Design

Machines have always been extremely precise entities. For it to pull this "coffee routine" off would be amazing .... but then again, why? Why does a smart robot need to do this particular task when a perfectly unintelligent one can do that task?

Is it ethical to make an artificially intelligent being do your busy work for you? Is AI slavery allowable, or should an intelligent being be given equal rights as humans? Also, doesn't AI necessitate foolish decision making too?

If a smart robot were given a task to go into the extreme environments of outer space which are dangerous and inaccessible to humankind, that would be one thing, but to get Steve Wazniac's morning cup of coffee!? Please! Unless the robot also has a nice rack and supermodel-like features, Steve would be better off not investing his money into this research.

Perhaps fembot spies could be given the top secret mission of stealing info from dictators of foriegn countries by sleeping with them, or go into burning houses that are on fire in order to save lives.

However, the next logical step should be in making artificially intelligent solar-powered oceanic weather monitoring survielance flotation orbs that can navigate around with GPS satellite and report the temperature/dew pt. of the various places on it's route. The challenge would be in navigating the ocean surface waves, and not getting eaten by sharks. Actually, just staying in one GPS location would be a challenge for the flotation orb.

Mon, 02/11/2008 - 05:31 — terren

AI ethics

The day that AIs become intelligent/conscious enough to argue for their rights, they should be given them. Until then, I see no serious moral qualms with having them work for us. If you're the kind of person who believes animals shouldn't be put to work for human use, then you might disagree with that. But most people I think would be comfortable with the above.

Mon, 02/11/2008 - 16:45 — RobDinsmore

I agree

There is a clear distinction between AI and Sentience. In order for a robot to do menial tasks it clearly needs to have some very capable artificial intelligence, but it does not need to be self aware at all. The level of AI a robot has would most likely need to reach some critical level of complexity before such thoughts could arise. And even then the robot would have to actively refuse to do anything before anyone would need to consider it's rights.

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