On command, the devices assorted themselves into squares, letters and sundry other shapes with no help from their keepers. Needless to say they’re not there yet, but they recently came a little closer with the development of new software and sensory apparatus that help machines become not only more aware of their surroundings, but able to perform rudimentary tasks cooperatively.Īrmed with those new technologies, scientists recently turned loose about 1,000 robots, each about the size of your thumbnail. For the armies of roboticists working the puzzle, the goal is to create an appliance that, given a clearly-defined “mission,” will figure out how to achieve that end all by itself. To do so, it must instantly identify and assess a potentially huge number of possible variables, arrive at a wholly independent “decision” based on nothing more than its own self-processed input, and originate action in the absence of situation-specific programming. Our theoretical autonomous robot can adapt to an ever-changing and unpredictable environment. No matter how smart the car, phone, or drone, it simply cannot do anything it’s not told to do. The second basic skill an “intelligent” device must master is doing things without being told exactly when and how to do them. And while that’s a baby step toward achieving even plankton’s mental acuity, it’s a giant leap toward creating an electronic “brain”, and IBM is already exploring ways to connect individual neurochips together into the kind of faux-neural network that could one day drive, say, a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 cybernetic infiltration unit on a hyper-alloy combat chassis. At present, IBM’s neurochip prototype, “TrueNorth”, contains 5.4 billion transistors and 256 million electronic “synapses” that together can process information far faster and more fluently than your one-thing-at-a-time Pentium can. Rather than passing every impulse along in restricted linear fashion, each neuron in your brain communicates directly with thousands of others, allowing the parallel processing of almost unlimited input. To understand how, consider that your brain contains something like 100 billion cells connected by 100 trillion synapses. Last year, scientists working at separate laboratories across the country simultaneously unveiled their own versions of the “neurochip,” a microprocessor that mimics the inner workings of the human bean. Sure, your PC can handle it, it just can’t handle it fast enough to permit practical autonomy. It’s an orderly and reliable process that can tot up a spreadsheet in the blink of an eye, but that quickly becomes overwhelmed by the flood of data presented by sensory input like vision. Current computer architecture manages information in a rigid series of logical steps. Although the vast and constantly expanding universe of Internet databases and increasingly agile optics may allow a machine to feast on all the same information that its creator can, and probably more, the breakdown occurs in digestion. First, a genuinely autonomous device must be able to process vast amounts of information instantaneously to produce a minutely accurate real-time understanding of its environment. The goal of self-directed machines remains elusive, and will remain so until scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) solve a couple of particularly prickly problems.Ī truly “thinking” machine must, at bare minimum, be capable of doing two things that people, puppies and plankton do without thinking. But it’s a long walk from GPS-guided lawn mowers to metal-punk kill-bots from the future, and, at the moment, everything fashioned by the hand of Man must also be guided by it. And it’s only easier to believe now, in this more refined era of talking phones and Google drones and wristwatches that can guess what you might want for lunch, maybe. The Terminator is an awesome movie because, even way back in the technological Dark Age of 1984, it wasn’t hard to believe that one day soon there’d be robots walking among us, sophisticated machines doing what they do without so much as a by-your-leave from feckless and fragile Homo sapiens sapiens. “A new order of intelligence…Decided our fate in a microsecond. “They say it got smart,” continues Reese, slamming another shell into the 12-gauge shotgun on his lap. Even so, she seems to have trouble focusing. And it’s surely something Connor should find interesting, what with Arnold Schwarzenegger dogging her like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. “New… powerful… hooked into everything and trusted to run it all.” “Defense network computers,” rasps Reese. Reese’s dirty-blond hair is stylishly mussed, his artfully scarred face sweaty, and streaked with grime just-so. She’s confused, panicky, and cute as a button. Time-traveler Kyle Reese hunches in the driver’s seat next to Sarah Connor.
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