Will robots invade our lives?

I want to tell you about today is how I see robots invading our lives at multiple levels, over multiple timescales. I think we're sort of on the cusp of robots becoming common, and I think we're sort of around 1978 or 1980 in personal computer years, when the first few robots are starting to appear.

Computers came around through games and toys. The first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play Pong, with a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that. And then there's a higher price point kind of robot toys – the Sony Aibo, for instance. Over the last two or three years we’ve seen lawn-mowing robots, such as Husqvarna. And in the last 12 months or so we've started to see a bunch of home-cleaning robots appear.

The intelligence on board of these devices was fairly simple. There's a sea change happening in where technology's going. Over the next couple of months, we're going to be sending robots in production down producing oil wells to get that last few years of oil out of the ground. 1. This is very hostile environment, 150˚ C, 10,000 PSI.

But robots like that are a little hard to programme. How, in the future, are we going to make it easier? The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing. For example, when a robot called Kismet is looking for a toy, you can tell when it's actually seeing the toy. And it's got a little bit of an emotional response: it expresses its emotion through its face and the prosody in its voice. In a similar way, we can make talking robots. When we communicate with someone, we talk, we sort of raise our eyebrows, move our eyes, give the other person the idea it's their turn to talk. And then they talk, and then we pass the baton back and forth between each other. So we can put this in the robot.

Two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them, will they need rights eventually and will they want to take over? To answer the first question, they are just machines. But I think we have to accept that we are just machines. That's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us. If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are. But for us to admit that, we have to give up on our uniqueness, in a certain way.. We've had the retreat from uniqueness under the barrage of science and technology many times over the last few hundred years, at least. We don't like to give up our uniqueness, so having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures – is going to be hard for us to accept. But we're going to come to accept it over the next 50 years or so.

And the second question is, will the machines want to take over? I don't think we're going to deliberately build robots that we're uncomfortable with. We aren’t going to have a super bad robot. Before that has to come to be a mildly bad robot, and before that a not so bad robot. So, I think I'm going to leave it at that: the robots are coming, we don't have too much to worry about. it's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope you all enjoy the journey over the next 50 years.

A.I.