At the recent RoboBusiness conference in Boston, companies demonstrated several advanced robots, including a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide, and security guard. A housekeeping robot developed in Japan can move chairs, sweep the floor, load dirty dishes into a dishwasher, and put clothes in a washing machine. Intel has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, short for Home Exploring Robotic Butler, that can recognize faces and execute commands such as “clean up this mess,” says Intel’s Justin Rattner. Last year, Rattner gave some credibility to the effort to make machines as intelligent as people, saying the industry has made significantly more progress during the past 40 years than people once believed possible. He said it is reasonable to believe that machines could overtake people in the ability to reason in the not-so-distant future. Nevertheless, experts say that programming a robot to perform tasks such as washing dishes is hard enough, and creating a truly intelligent robot is still a staggeringly difficult challenge. “One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Rodney Brooks. “But how and when we will get there–and what will happen after we do–are now the subjects of fierce debate.” Technology evangelist Ray Kurzweil predicts that robots will match human intelligence in 20 years, a point in time he calls the singularity. Stanford University’s Paul Saffo says robot intelligence is making steady progress. “The truly interesting question is what happens after we have truly intelligent robots,” Saffo says. “If we’re very lucky, they’ll treat us as pets. If not, they’ll treat us as food.”
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