Robots closing in on humans

after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.”

“We’re in a slow retreat in the face of the steady advance of our mind’s children,” agreed Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at Stanford University. “Eventually, we’re going to reach the point where everybody’s going to say, ‘Of course machines are smarter than we are.’ The truly interesting question is what happens after if we have truly intelligent robots,” Saffo said. “If we’re very lucky, they’ll treat us as pets. If not, they’ll treat us as food.”

More audacious futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only twenty years from now. According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called “Turing test.” In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can not tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence. “We can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s,” Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near. (you may also want to the Kurzweil’s Web site, KurzweilAI.net)

For Kurzweil, the “singularity” is when a machine equals or exceeds human intelligence. It will not come in “one great leap,” he said, “but lots of little steps to get us from here to there.” Kurzweil has made a movie, also titled “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” which is due in theaters this summer.

Boyd writes that Intel’s Rattner is more conservative. He said that it would take at least until 2050 to close the mental gap between people and machines. Others say that it will take centuries, if it ever happens. Others — Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, and Mitch Kapor, a leading computer scientist in San Francisco — doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being. It is “extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation,” Kapor said. “While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning ‘Jeopardy’ — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or … have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.”

Still and all, roboticists are working to make their mechanical creatures seem more human. The Japanese are particularly fascinated with “humanoid” robots, with faces, movements, and voices resembling their human masters. A fetching female robot model from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology lab in Tsukuba, Japan, sashays down a runway, turns, and bows when “she” meets a real girl.

“People become emotionally attached” to robots, Saffo said. Two-thirds of the people who own Roombas, the humble floor-sweeping robots, give them names, he said. One-third take their Roombas on vacation.

At a technology conference last October in San Jose, California, Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT robot developer, demonstrated her attempts to build robots that mimic human and social skills. She showed off “Leonardo,” a rabbity creature that reacts appropriately when a person smiles or scowls. “Robot sidekicks are coming,” Breazeal said. “We already can see the first distant cousins of R2-D2,” the sociable little robot in the “Star Wars” movies.

Other MIT researchers have developed an autonomous wheelchair that understands and responds to commands to “go to my room” or “take me to the cafeteria.”

So far, most robots are used primarily in factories, repeatedly performing single tasks. Boyd writes that the Robotics Institute of America estimates that more than 186,000 industrial robots are being used in the United States, second only to Japan. It is estimated that more than a million robots are being used worldwide, with China and India rapidly expanding their investments in robotics.