The Future of Robots (Article for “Flipside” magazine - young people’s magazine pub. IET)

We tend to picture a robot as a mechanical version of a living person or animal and certainly these anthropomorphic (or human like) forms are one direction that robot engineers are taking. Other sorts of robots, however, are less attractive to look at but they help to us; manufacture cheaply and accurately in factories, dispose of unexploded bombs and decommission nuclear power stations safely, help doctors perform amazing micro-surgery and to explore Mars. A less obvious form of robot (often called a bot) is a type of software programme that performs its actions autonomously (on its own).

There is no complete definition of what constitutes a robot. Some scientists think that in the longer term, a class of robots will not just be machines capable of learning autonomously, but true consciousness may emerge along with emotions, personality and the sorts of traits we associate with sentient living creatures. Of course this is a disturbing notion that will challenge many cultural norms and is thus deeply controversial (and has been the subject of many sci-fi stories!) The question an engineer might ask though is: could we make one and how would we do it?

Although machine learning and artificial intelligent software has made some good progress, it is not really anywhere close to the goal of true consciousness. Artificial speech recognition software, the Internet search engine are useful examples of autonomous machine learning programs today and the Semantic Web is seeking to put more intelligence into the Web in the near future.

Since we don’t understand what consciousness is, and whether our minds are definable, it is unlikely we shall be able to copy them any time soon. A more likely prospect, however, is to work with nature and perhaps uses brain cells (neurons) that are natures computing structures, to perhaps grow a brain for a mechanical robot which is living. Although we may not understand how a partly biological robot works (at least initially), we may, however, get to the point of having a robot with at least some degree of autonomy and recognisable consciousness. It would perhaps respond to us in the same way as we would expect from a pet or a working animal.