Quality of human life to improve when meek robots inherit the earth

Net Results: Will robots eventually inherit the earth? Prof Rodney Brooks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), thinks so - but not quite in the way the question is posed. "We'll be becoming a little more robot-like over time," he says.

While Hollywood likes to tell us that we will either be annihilated when robots invade and take over the planet, or gradually replaced as robots grow smarter, he thinks that humans and robots will merge to form some new, enhanced, long-lived creature that is still basically human.

That's not as scary as it might sound. He points to pacemakers and cochlear implants (small devices implanted into the ear allowing deaf people limited hearing capacity) as evidence that we are already adding electronic enhancements to our bodies without anyone getting worked up about the idea.

"Also, the modern scientific view of ourselves is that we are machines," he said, speaking to an audience at the Ark in Temple Bar, as part of the British Association Festival of Science last Saturday.

"Biomolecules come together and react and interact in various ways, and modern science takes a mechanistic view of that. It's not as if they say, A and B come together and then the soul intervenes," he says with a laugh.

As for the Hollywood scenario, he notes: "In principle, machines - robots - could be built that are as smart as us, better than us, as emotional as us. Whether we are smart enough to build a robot that is better than us is another question."

As one of the world's foremost authorities on robots - and having spent his career building them himself at MIT - he says that he tends to doubt that we could even match a raccoon's intelligence and dexterity in machine form.

"But what we are seeing is that, as we build those small machines of silicon and steel, we take them and put them inside the human body.

"Pacemakers and cochlear implants already have a direct silicon to brain interface happening, and we're going to see more connections between silicon, steel and human brains."

He says he is confident that people will soon want neural implants - implants right into the brain itself - and he says that he has a one-word answer to those who say the idea is abhorrent - botox.

"Who'd have thought people would be willing to inject botulism into their faces?"

Brooks takes a jovial approach to a subject many might find worrying - the first thing he'd want as an enhancement in his own body would be a direct internet link so he could Google in his mind, he says - but he is quite serious in making predictions about the future.

He says that we have already become more dependent on machines over time. A visitor from 1900 would no doubt find us quite bizarre in being so reliant on a tiny machine - a mobile phone - that fits in our pockets for our daily communications.

Progress in the area of biotechnology fascinates him.

He says that recent research on enabling individual cells to act as tiny computers "is not to turn cells into computers, but to gain digital control over cells".

The result would be cells that could be told to construct themselves into various objects.

Rather than having to grow a forest to create the wood to build things, wouldn't it be better to just grow a door?

"Grow a door? I think we'll be seeing that over the next 50 years," he says. He also predicts that biological engineering for medicine will become big business - for growing replacement organs, for example, and robots will be developed with biological parts.

"As we move out in time, what's a robot and what's a person is going to get murkier.

I think that it's going to get harder and harder to draw a line over what is human," Brooks says.

As that happens, the ethical, social and moral debates will grow louder.

"I think that we are going to face questions which make current debates over stem cells, using animals for research, or cloning look trivial."

What are the enhancements he expects to see on the market first? Anything that prevents our sight and hearing degrading as a result of old age, Brooks says.

He is sure that night vision ability will be popular, as will having an inbuilt network connection to link to the internet - or whatever it evolves into.

An audience member raises a hand. "If robots are going to inherit the earth, is there any chance that they will be meek?"

Brooks laughs. "I think they would have to be," he replies.

After all, we will be the ones making them - or becoming them. We don't want to find out that the enemy is us.

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