AI Priests and Killer Robots

Posted 31 Dec 2002 at 20:54 UTC by steve

The World Future Society has released their 2003 Forecast. The WFS experts say we'll have AI Priests in 2004, designer babies in 2005, video tattoos in 2010, robot insects to pollinate crops in 2012, plaque-eating nanobots in our toothpaste by 2020, and, of course, the first bionic olympics by 2030. If those predictions are too mundane, the Weekly World News reports that Super-Robots will wipe out mankind soon but it won't matter because the sun will explode in 6 years.

Now let us have a little talk with Jesus, posted 1 Jan 2003 at 00:35 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

A priest (exempting the Catholic defination) is someone who can talk with God. I'm curious to know how they've figured out how to create a robot which can communicate with God? Wouldn't that be a feat? Really what I think they mean is that they've created a electronic statue that you can talk to and tell all of your deep dark secrets to and which will wait until you stop speaking and then can say something like, "OK whatever you say my child, now I prescribe that you go and do the rosery rand(x) number of times, and say rand(x) number of hail marys, etc. and your sins will be forgiven." It'll be interesting to see if anyone really accepts that nonsense. Ok so even if they don't call it a "Priest" but just a "councellor," how can a robot be programmed to give any good advice when even humans don't always know how to prescribe good advice? Awe, I guess it doesn't really matter since the Sun will explode soon? Boom baby!

Mostly fantasy, posted 1 Jan 2003 at 13:16 UTC by motters » (Master)

Some of these predictions are reasonable, but most of them - especially the ones about robots destroying mankind - are pure fantasy.

In my view it's a sad that some of these so-called "AI experts" are so completely divorced from the reality of actual AI research that they often come out with this sort of garbage. I think they're doing it purely for cheap publicity, usually to boost book sales or attract short-term funding for their department.

I have some respect for Moravec because he's done good work in the past (including stuff on stereo vision) but I doubt that even he believes that there will be a robot takeover "in a few years".

The problems in AI are big. Really big. And although progress has been made over the last 50 years there are no signs that we're in for any huge breakthroughs within the next few years. Human level intelligence I think is still a long way off. People like Steve Grand may claim to have new technologies in the making, but I think it's important to maintain a healthy scientific skepticism and judge people by their actual results rather than any speculations they may make.

- Bob