Re:What hope is there? (Score 1)

I used to have the same view about robots -- ahh! they will take over! It's the next evolutionary leap! I've changed my mind. Here is why. Human bodies are incredibly complex, and each cell is equivalent to a PC of crazy power. The organism itself is built in such a way that it's nearly impossible to destroy. Now, take a robot, or rather, take a computer that is controlling it. Take a single bus line on that computer's CPU and cut it. OFF. No more robot. I've seen some microscopic pictures of what happens to VLSI circuits over time. Crystals form on the metal parts, eventually connecting data routs, effectively shorting them out and rendering them useless. Entropy in action. Human bodies learned to deal with entropy by constantly renewing their components, but how can you renew a robot without replacing half of its components? Granted, you can replace the whole robot and save the data, or mental state, but these machines seem awfully unreliable and requiring great resources to survive even a short term. Let's now examine the human brain. It contains in order of 10 Billion neurons in its frontal lobes. Each neuron, mind you, is not the simple neuron used in AI, but it is a supercomputer of its own, processing its inputs in a very complex way before creating some kind of a result. While it's possible that humans will be able to create computers with the same power as human brains, it won't be any time soon. It will be quite a while before robots' replacing humans will become commonplace. Walking past a construction site, I marvel at how little robotization really exists. Sure, they use plows and bobcats and other large scale tools, but the command center of it all is still human. It's silly to think that this will change any time soon. In order for robots to rival humans in any way, they have to exist on this planet for a long time, learning from their own experience making connections between actions and outcomes. It won't happen overnight, and once it will happen, it will liberate the human kind from the slavery into which we have been bound from the first time we walked on two legs. -pm