Robots and artificial intelligence

"Robots, write me homework!"

"Robot, make me a sandwich!"

"Robot, vacuum my room!"

"Robot, iron my suit!"

Luckily, we have robots that… Wait, we don't have robots like this yet. Why do you think that is so?

Robots

It’s not too hard to make a robot. If we have Lego cubes at our disposal, or we are skilled in processing wood, metal, or plastic, we can make something that will be our vision of a robot. However, will that robot be able to start? Probably not, if we didn't make wrists like the ones we have on our arms and legs. And even then, the robot will not be able to move independently, like humans. In order to do that, we have to build some source of energy into it, like a battery. And not only that, but we have to conduct that energy (electricity) to his arms, legs, and head in some way.

When we have done all that, our robot finally becomes mobile. Just… He doesn't see where he's going, and he hits things. With all that, he can't pick up any object, and even if he could, he wouldn't know how tightly he should grab it. He does not hear our orders, nor can he answer us if we ask him anything. You suspect that making a robot that would do something requires us to think about a large number of little things. It is these things that engineers, constructors, and programmers who design, build, and program robots think about. Some of these robots have found their place in car production, food, rubble removal, and various other areas. But despite their presence in the areas we have listed, we still cannot talk to them the way we talk to other people. Why?

Programming and artificial intelligence

In order to understand why our imagined robot is not working and does not understand what we are telling him, we must first start with us, humans. Growing up, each of us learned to speak, to recognize things and people in the world around us, to think and learn how to solve the problems he encounters, to read and write. And that's exactly what we have to teach our robot. The problem is that we can teach a robot to read and write, but, at least for now, not to fully understand what it has read, or to accurately recognize things and people around it, as well as to think and create what he had not seen before, or what did not exist before. That is, for now, we cannot teach a robot to be intelligent. If we succeeded in that, we would create something called artificial intelligence, which is intelligence that did not come into being naturally (like a human) but was made (programmed) by someone.

Creating such a robot (or program) that could upgrade or improve itself is not at all easy. The problems we have listed are dealt with by a large number of scientists from various fields - programming, electronics, medicine, biology, philosophy, and many others. All of them usually cooperate with each other and use the knowledge gained by other scientists. For now, it seems that in the near future we will not get to fully mobile and intelligent robots as we have seen in the movies.

Maybe it wouldn't be bad if we had robots that would do everything we told them to do instead of us. However, if robots did everything for us (for example, studied, or wrote homework), what would we do in those situations when robots break down or are simply not around? Or, more seriously, what would we do if such a robot decides that it doesn't need people?