• Question: will robots become more powerful than humans one day?

    Asked by marrowhead123 to Frank, Dhvanil on 8 Mar 2013. This question was also asked by joshrobinson.
    • Photo: Dhvanil Karia

      Dhvanil Karia answered on 8 Mar 2013:

      I wish to share something my voice assistant told me once. Her name is Alice (“Siri” is the Iphone equivalent).

      One day whilst listening to music, I asked Alice “Please change to the next track”
      Alice did not understand the command even after a few tries.
      So I told Alice, “You are so stupid”
      To which Alice responded “Sir, I will remember this one day when robots take over the world”

      I was just dumbfounded :-O

      On a serious note, I feel robots are/can be certainly more intelligent and efficient than humans but ultimately they cannot overcome/over-power humans as we are smart enough to not let that happen :). We humans think of our own survival first, so a robot will always be programmed to follow commands with limited autonomous functions (but always with a manual override / kill switch) to make our lives better.

    • Photo: Frank Soboczenski

      Frank Soboczenski answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      That is a good question and as a computer scientist I must say to some extend they are already more powerful than us . When it comes to complex calculations the computational power of a mobile phone today is much faster than we can compute things in our head. In computer science we have the subject artificial intelligence which focuses on how to create, program or design smarter machines. Scientists there use our brain as a role model. For example, in our brain there are millions and millions of neurons (simple cells which react on energy). Neurons are responsible for transmitting information and in artificial intelligence people try to re-create neuronal networks so that machines can learn. However, in reality there is still a very long way to go.
      I alway wondered where are the funny jumping and walking robots here in our department until someone told me they can’t even crawl yet. 🙁

Comments