In many ways, robots already do think for themselves, in the sense that they may have the ability to assess all the information available in a particular situation and make a decision based on what they “know”. Some robots can also “learn”, so that if an action is unsuccessful, they do not repeat it. But any robot is only as good as the electronic circuits that cause it to move and the engineering that has enabled it to respond physically to electronic signals. As computer technology becomes more sophisticated, so will robots. It is likely that they will play an important role in all our lives in the twenty-first century.
Generally, we say that robots don’t have feelings and so they can’t behave like humans. But the most important thing is the evolution through which we learn or develop a lot of new things about which we were never aware before that point. Perhaps the so called early humans, Homo erectus didn’t have feelings and as the time passed by they were exposed to different situations and in trying to adapt to them they developed the feelings like hunger, pain, fear, love and so on. So if we give enough time and if robots have the ability to evolve in time, they could one day become as intelligent as humans and may have the feelings. Is this not possible?
This is of course not entirely true. A robot could mimic feelings, regardless of it actually feeling them, and could thus behave human-like. Also look up on the Turing-test on this one. But to cut down to the chase, we, humans, got certain hardware, biological equivalents to software and our neural system is a closed system, so yeah, we are theoretically able to fully create that, which includes everything from perception, to feelings, to creativity. The reason that we cannot do that right now, depends on our current understanding of the brain and (perhaps) the state of current technological equipment.
Finally, I’d like to respond to a couple of remarks from John Galvin: “AI, Robotics and so forth will always be bonded by the code created for them, and for such an AI to be consider equal to our mortal intelligence would require a programmer of greater intelligence”
We too are bonded by code (DNA, basically) and there is absolutely no reason to believe that we cannot figure out our own code (not saying it’s easy though). So, once fully understood, there is no reason to assume that we cannot make ourselves. Heck, we’re already reproducing ourselves by the billions; we just gotta look beyond the GUI of sexual intercourse.
Finally, you talk about the 7 logical gates a computer uses. Our current understanding of the brain tells us that neurons do precisely just that. Obviously, a computer is able to perform billions of actions with just those 7 gates; it’s just that we don’t exactly know how the brain uses those 7 gates to do what it does.
Picture Credit : Google
