The future of robotics?: Humanoid machines with the ability to express genuine emotions.

Credit: Blutgruppe/Zefa/Corbis

At present a robot's computer brain has to read data from each of its sensors, one after another, before it can work out its exact position. It is laborious and seriously limits speed. Increased computing power and development of multiple processors will allow these readings to be analysed simultaneously – while also pushing AI experts to design software that can deal with multiple data inputs.

This field is driven by the need to build complex automated robots that can work in hostile environments at speed: nuclear reactor repair vehicles, submersibles and rover vehicles for European and U.S. missions to Mars. Consider the current generation of Mars rovers. They move at a snail's pace because they can only check, with painful slowness, the input from each of their sensors.

Future craft, such as Europe's ExoMars project, will be designed to move much more quickly across the planet's surface in their search for life, and will require considerable use of multiple processing computing. Similarly, missions to the moons of Jupiter, such as Europa – where ice-covered seas may harbour underwater life forms – will require spacecraft to carry robot submersibles capable of even more rapid data processing.

Devices like these should be in operation in a decade or so. By then, robots will also be helping to care for the elderly, playing important roles in surgical operations, controlling our cars and replacing soldiers in the battlefield. This still leaves us some way short of the intelligent machines envisaged by Clarke or Asimov, however – a point acknowledged by Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert who is director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA.

"It is almost impossible to predict when machines will become as clever as humans," he says. "That will depend on breakthroughs that still have to take place, and given that research in AI progresses in fits and starts, it is impossible to predict timescales accurately."

According to Arkin, two major areas of research need to be addressed before computers acquire the intelligence of humans: vision and the processing of information as it flows through the human cortex. "We will not create the artificial equivalent of human intelligence until we understand these issues," he says.

"That requires breakthroughs in brain research that have yet to be made, although work in magnetic resonance imaging holds great promise," he adds. "Researchers can now watch areas of the brain light up as individuals carry out specific mental tasks. When we have that knowledge, we can pass it on to computers."

Most researchers say it will take several decades to achieve that goal. However futurologist and computer expert Ray Kurzweil believes artificial intelligence could be on par with human intellect by the 2020s. After that, machine intelligence would outstrip that of the human brain as computers and robots learn to communicate, teach and replicate among themselves. "Once non-biological intelligence matches the range and subtlety of human intelligence, it will soar past it because of the acceleration of information-based technologies and the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge," Kurzweil says. In short, humanity will become just the means to a technological end.

The prognosis for humanity in such a world would not seem to be too healthy. "It certainly suggests there is a good case for ensuring these machines are programmed to the right ethical standards," adds Arkin.

Most researchers believe such a prognosis is remote, particularly given current rates of research and development. On the other hand, we should not despair of machines showing any intelligence at all in the near future.

"Look at Google or Amazon," says Cristianini. "Both display the attributes of intelligence. For example, Amazon is designed to recommend books to users based on the preferences of other people and to suggest works about which its creators could have known nothing. That is intelligence. So, in a sense, AI is with us already."