No sex please, robot, just clean the floor
By Ed Habershon and Richard Woods (Sunday Times)
Updated: 2006-06-21 15:09
But far more sophisticated machines are being developed. The National Health
Service has used a robot called da Vinci to perform surgery at Guy's and St
Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust in London. In Japan, human-like robots such as
Honda’s Asimo and Sony's Qrio can walk on two legs. More advanced versions are
expected to be undertaking everyday domestic tasks and helping to care for the
elderly in as little as 20 years.
"I would hope they would always be subordinate," said Brian Aldiss, the
science fiction writer. "But one will no doubt come to rely on them deeply."
Aldiss's short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long was the basis for the Steven
Spielberg film AI, which addressed the subject of whether androids that have
become as intelligent as humans should be denied equal rights.
Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen. "People are
going to be having sex with robots within five years," he said. So should limits
be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys? The greatest
danger, however, is likely to lie with robots that are able to learn from their
"experiences". As systems develop, robots are likely to have much more
sophisticated self-learning mechanisms built into them and it may become
impossible to predict exactly how they will behave.
"My guess is that we'll have conscious machines before 2020," said Ian
Pearson, futurologist-in-residence at BT. "If we put that in a robot, it's an
android. That is an enormous ethical change."
To critics who scoff that intelligent robots are a long
way off, the roboticists easily riposte that machines can already exert
surprising influence over our lives — think about the influence of the internet.
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