From reading science fiction books it could be seen how the human imagination draws its own vision of the future. To a certain extent, this vision predicted the pace of the technology development that the world is living in. One of the many aspects that these predictions outran is the development of humanoid robots. Science fiction books and films drew a picture of progress that the current technological development cannot compete with…yet. This paper analyzes the article “The Real Transformers” by Robin Marantz Henig in which the author follows the progress in the field of robotics seeking answers about the directions to which this progress is heading.
The title of the article is a clear reference to the popular franchise of the same name – transformers. The addition of “Real” in the title clearly indicates the theme of the article, in which the gap between the progress in the fields of robots and science fiction predictions casts doubt on whether we can achieve similar progress in the near future. The author indicates the difficulty of development, as “humanoids are not the sophisticated machines we might have expected by now, which just shows how complicated a task it was that scientists embarked on 15 years ago when they began working on a robot that could think.” (HENIG, 2007) Although the robot development did not reach the level of progress predicted by science fiction, as “the robots being built today, still unwieldy and temperamental even in the most capable hands, probably offer only hints of the way we might be using robots in another 30 years”, still modern robotics typically are developing very fast. It is enough to tell that for a short term (approximately 15 years) robots have passed the way from scientific and technical ideas to serially manufactured samples which total number is estimated in thousands today.
Any developments of technologies have given and become the initial stage in the creation of robots. Robots are similar beings working by means of power which are capable of learning to distinguish various environments and to carry out different operations without human involvement. However, it only can be assumed that the robots will help us doing the most dangerous and dirty work, thereby simplifying our life. But looking in the future and the past it is possible to see that scientists emphasize the human aspect of robot development, providing robots with artificial intelligence and human characteristics, i.e. sociable robots. “Sociable robots come equipped with the very abilities that humans have evolved to ease our interactions with one another: eye contact, gaze direction, turn-taking, shared attention. They are programmed to learn the way humans learn, by starting with a core of basic drives and abilities and adding to them as their physical and social experiences accrue.” (HENIG, 2007)
The possible threats of the sociable robots revealed in the article, where “sociable robots are programmed to exhibit the kind of behaviour we have come to associate with sentience and empathy” can lead to the conclusion on why the technological development of robotics has not reached the level predicted in science fiction books. The creation of human-like beings is a controversial aspect, in which these beings would only learn to simulate emotions. However, even though it is difficult to predict that technological progress will allow scientists to create human like beings, one thing is definite, i.e. “we want the machine to help us understand about being human.” (HENIG, 2007)
References
HENIG, R. M. (2007). The Real Transformers. Web.