Robotics

This week, Professor Vesna introduced the topic of robotics starting from the industrialization period. When printing press were introduced in the west, and machines and assembly lines were invented in the industrialization age, mass production began. It undoubtedly brought a lot of benefits to people's lives, like reduction in production costs, thus cheaper and more affordable goods. However, it also brought the critique of mechanization of workers, in other words, workers were treated as part of the
machines or even replaced by machines.


Karel Capek was the first person introducing the word "robot". As he mentioned in his book, the word "robots" first came another word "robota", which means "work" in Czech and a lot of Slavic languages. He addressed his concern of robotic life in his famous play R.U.R., where a group of robots first happily works for human, but eventually a hostile robot rebellion leads to the extinction of human race. The robots in Karel Capek's play were actually more like what we call as androids today.

And his concern is still shared today by many people. A lot of movies today still address the fear of developed artificial intelligence taking over human world. Ex Machina is one of them. It described how a humanoid robot named Ava with artificial intelligence successfully relates to a programmer emotionally, and used him to escape the lab, yet ruthlessly killed her creator in the escaping process, and abandoned the programmer in the lab.
Except for this film, there are many other films expressing the danger of over development of artificial intelligence. Transcendence is a special one, since the main character used to be a human scientist, after knowing he has less than a month to live, he uploaded his minds to a quantum computer, and developed many advanced technologies, one of which is to manipulate human minds.


Transcendence played by Johnny Depp

Other than these scientific fiction films concentrating on the topic of artificial intelligence, in real life, we also have breakthroughs in AI. Recently, AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google, has beaten Lee Sedol, a 9-dan professional and world champion, in the board game Go. This victory marked the milestone in artificial intelligence research, but also raised some concern in the AI community. Some scholars warned that even though AlphaGo does not possess general intelligence, but some future self-improving AI may be able to acquire general intelligence and lead to a human takeover. Some other scholars believe that it's impossible for AIs to develop things like "common sense", so there is no reason to fear.

Treating or not, the field of artificial intelligence still remains largely unexplored. I don't think people need to start feeling scared or threatened, however, it is time for people to start paying attention.



Citations:

Vesna, Victoria. "Robotics Pt2." YouTube. Uconlineprogram, 2012. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Capek, Karel. "R.U.R." EBooks@Adelaide, 17 Dec. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Borowiec, Steven, and Tracey Lien. "AlphaGo Beats Human Go Champ in Milestone for Artificial Intelligence." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 12 Mar. 2016. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Seitz, Matt Zoller. "Transcendence Movie Review & Film Summary (2014) | Roger Ebert." Rogerebert.com. 17 Apr. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Seitz, Matt Zoller. "Ex Machina Movie Review & Film Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert." Rogerebert.com. 9 Apr. 2015. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.