Hey guys, it is a really interesting topic that we have here.
Today, we do not have robots in space; we have remote controlled machines. Da Vinci, the most advanced surgical robot is completely controlled by a Human and all robotic platforms we know in law enforcement are all controlled at distance by a human. All industrial Robots that I saw have a big red button that allow a human to take over…and I still have the control over all my domestic robots…
Anyway, I think we miss the point. Even if we project ourselves in the future, if we think this way, I think we miss the point.
Forgot the mechanic aspect of the robots for a moment and think of it in terms of intelligence - IPS (instruction per second). The capacity of the human brain is estimated at around 10 to the power of 14 (100 trillion IPS) and this capacity has not changed a lot within the last millennium…
Personal computer today provide more than 10 to the power of 9 IPS. According to the exponential growth of computing, they will reach the brain capacity by 2025. The IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer provide some peak of more than 300 trillion IPS today, 3 times the brain power. According to some scientists and IT gurus, it is reasonable to believe that by 2050, if the trends of exponential growth of the price-performance, capacity and speed of our hardware continue, one thousand dollars of computing will exceed the processing power of all human brain on earth…
I think the future is not robots against humans or humans having control over robots… I think if we think like this, we miss the point and we will lose the game.
We, Human, will need to merge with technology if we want to survive. Period. We will still call ourselves human, but we will be made of flesh and machine… We will have full control over things, as we have right now, but in a different way.
Ho, and yes… the human of tomorrow (or robots), depends on how you want to call them, will be much more capable and much more intelligent. I am working on it. A lot of people are working on it. And I strongly believe this is for a better world, because if we look around today, we have a lot of things to improve and a lot of big issues to fix… Too much in my opinion for our actual capacity.