When Mind and Body (Artificial Intelligence and Robotics) Are Integrated
Wendell H. Chun · 2024
The desire for intelligent machines was just an elusive dream until the first computer was developed. The early computers could manipulate large databases effectively by following prescribed algorithms but could not reason about the information provided. This gave rise to the question of whether computers could ever think. Alan Turing defined the intelligent behavior of a computer as the ability to achieve human-level performance in a cognitive task. The main advances in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past 60 years have been advances in search algorithms, machine-learning algorithms, and integrating statistical analysis into understanding the world at large. In the field of AI, expectations seem to always outpace the reality. After decades of research, no computer has come close to passing the Turing Test (a model for measuring “intelligence”); expert systems have grown but have not become as common as human experts; and while we’ve built software that can beat humans at some games, open-ended games are still far from the mastery of computers. Intelligent systems interpret raw data according to probabilistic models and use contextual information that gives meaning to the data. We have described autonomous robots with the warehouse example as the integration of several weak AI technologies with the hardware. In Asimov and Capek’s vision, the ultimate goal for robotics is a humanoid with Strong AI (Artificial General Intelligence). There are several reasons for building a humanoid: Minsky postulated that people enjoyed looking at themselves, for example, seeing oneself on a mirror but for better reasons, the world is designed to accommodate humans in terms of using tools and fitting into a world designed around people. Others have argued that a robot would be socially acceptable if the robot looks more like a person ( Figure 5.1 ).