Rise of the Machines

As man races through technological advancements, moving further and further toward the kind of existence only envisioned in science fiction films, we, as a captivated audience, can only speculate on what this future may hold. With man creating machines that are ever more able to imitate and appear to take on human life, how long is it before they no longer need our input and are 'living' and acting creatively for themselves. Or is this out of our reach? Surely man must truly understand every facet of his own mind before successfully engineering that of another?

Man has now reached a level in the creation of artificial intelligence that it can now consider the applications of, say, a robot that thinks and acts for itself, even one that can program itself and possibly others. But it is still only consideration, the level of technology required for this to be a reality remains far from our reach. For now we have imitation; robotics acting through human programming and built to resemble us.



The capability of this female robot in imitating human movement and our outward characteristics may not quite stand up against the real thing, but in some cases, it can be enough to convince people that these robots are of an independent intelligence; arguably a prerequisite for creativity. Though obviously this is not the case, rather an example of complex animatronics and programming.

So what is it a machine needs in order to be creative of it's own freewill, in other words to program itself? Not speaking in any technical terms, it could be said that a machine requires a self-awareness, an ability for observation and curiosity; perhaps a certain element of personality? A man named Alan Turing (1912-1954), the founder of computer science, devised a simple but ingenius test in order to determine whether or not a machine held these abilities, and therefore the ability to think for itself. In order for the machine to be successful in proving its intelligence and pass the test it must be deceitful under interrogation, it must be creative! I have only touched on Turing's theories, but you can find out more here at Alan Turing's Homepage

No machine, as of yet, has passed the Turing test, so we can only wonder what great things will be achieved by computer scientists in the future. Will machines ever reach a level where they are effectively re-creating themselves, even bettering themselves for their own means? In popular culture, namely science fiction, we have enjoyed this notion in films such as The Terminator and literature such as I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. I say enjoy, but it seems we embrace these thoughts with a certain sense of trepidation; fearful that our own creations will turn against us! But I guess this is a possible eventuality that must be factored into the equation; would intelligent machines, as a collective 'species', necessitate such atrocities as war?