From all of the research, projects and general progress mentioned above, youre probably wondering what stops the unification of all the work so far into a coherent plastic pal whos fun to be with. Wha
From all of the research, projects and general progress mentioned above, youre probably wondering what stops the unification of all the work so far into a coherent plastic pal whos fun to be with. What are the difficulties still stopping robots wandering the landscape? Bishop, the synthetic person from Aliens, and the replicants of Blade Runner point the way here. For all the work on the inside the head problems of AI, building a body complex enough to house even a rat-level intelligence, much less a human-scale mind, is a daunting technical challenge. The complexity of our minds are, at least to some degree, delineated by the complexity of interaction we can have with the world - as discussed earlier in regard of the Turing Test. Build a second rate body and get a slow mind in development.
Strange though it may seem one of the biggest engineering problems for building a body for our fledgling AIs is skin. Our skin is our largest sensory organ, and provides us with an enormous amount of information about our body. Everything from the obvious senses of pressure, heat and cold, moisture, and pain through to more obscure, but highly important information about airflow around us and the position of and strain on our limbs. That we are covered in sensitive skin allows us to initially correlate our various senses - we can both see our hand and feel when it moves. Compared to the rich sensory realm provided by our skin, our best robots have only occasional strain and angular sensors in their joints, and perhaps the odd pressure sensor: they are essentially body-blind. How can we expect self-awareness from something that lacks a direct perception of its physical existence?
Of course, all is not lost. At least two revolutions seem to be waiting in the wings of science, both of which could offer solutions to the problem of building bodies. Materials science seems poised on the brink of a new era long presaged in science fiction - the nano-scale revolution. Similarly, biology is set to become an experimental science on an entirely new level as the human and other genomes are decoded. A much clearer understanding of ontogenesis, the process by which organisms develop from a single cell to systems as complex as human beings, is one of the likely benefits of the cracking of the genetic code - powerfully relevant stuff.
Advances in the integration of living tissue with electronic systems also seems remarkably relevant. Manufacturing and integrating something as sophisticated as even a rudimentary artificial skin, requires processes on around the same scale as that of our bodies: technology seems to be converging on this problem at an exponential rate.