gram and drive the person
on the other end crazy.
FIGURE 7. Harrison
Ford and Sean Young.
Photo courtesy of NBC.
From Intelligent
Computers to
Intelligent
Robots
purposes impossible for a machine
to have enough different organs to
make it act in all the contingencies of
life in the way in which our reason
makes us act.”
FIGURE 6. David Hanson
working on Einstein’s head.
We think of the creators
of 20th-21st century science
Not bad for a thinker of 370 years
ago, long before any sort of true
humanoid robot. Turing based a lot of
his work on Descartes’ writings.
paper entitled: Computing Machinery
and Intelligence. It basically stated: “A
human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human
and one machine, each of which tries
to appear human; if the judge cannot
reliably tell which is which, then the
machine is said to pass the test. In
order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render
words into audio, the conversation is
limited to a text-only channel such as
a computer keyboard and screen.”
as the only people who have thought
of machines as being human.
Seventeenth century French philosopher, Rene Descartes’ famous
“Discourse on the Method of Rightly
Conducting the Reason and Seeking
Truth in the Sciences” had an interesting
viewpoint on ‘human machines.’
Descartes — known by many as the
“Father of Modern Philosophy,” and
much of subsequent Western philosophy,
wrote the following in his Discourse:
The amazing Nikola Tesla — also a
follower of Descartes and a developer
of ‘automata’ (there was no word,
‘robot’ at the time) — wrote the
following: “... I have by every thought
and act of mine, demonstrated,
and does so daily, to my absolute
satisfaction that I am an automaton
endowed with power of movement,
which merely responds to external
stimuli beating upon my sense organs,
and thinks and moves accordingly ...”
It was his way of determining if a
machine (computer) could think — a
basic attribute of a human being.
Figure 5 shows a popular cartoon
of two dogs at a computer by Peter
Steiner from the New Yorker Magazine
which depicts a very valid argument
about intelligence and whose it may be
on the Internet. It is both humorous and
frightening. With today’s instant messaging on the Internet and on cell phones,
the sometimes cryptic sentences and
responses could easily be generated by
a computer. A person with an evil bent
could easily turn their computer’s IM
session over to a carefully-crafted pro-
FIGURE 8. Hubo Hanson’s
Einstein.
“If there were machines which
bore a resemblance to our bodies and
imitated our actions as closely as
possible for all practical purposes, we
should still have two very certain
means of recognizing that they were
not real men. The first is that they
could never use words, or put together
signs, as we do in order to declare
our thoughts to others. For we can
certainly conceive of a machine so
constructed that it utters words, and
even utters words that correspond to
bodily actions causing a change in its
organs ... But it is not conceivable
that such a machine should
produce different arrangements
of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to
whatever is said in its presence, as
the dullest of men can do.
Secondly, even though some
machines might do some things as
well as we do them, or perhaps
even better, they would inevitably
fail in others, which would reveal
that they are acting not from
understanding, but only from the
disposition of their organs. For
whereas reason is a universal
instrument, which can be used in
all kinds of situations, these
organs need some particular
action; hence it is for all practical
“Obviously, to put into practice
this idea, it would be possible to
construct a machine that would have
the arms and legs, and which would
walk in an upright position, but this
would additionally complicate the
task and make it more complex.”
Humanoids of Today
FIGURE 9.
Actroid-DER-01.
I believe that all of us who build
robots have come to the conclusion
that it is not necessarily our complex
communication process that sets us
apart from the animal world or even
the best humanoid robots in existence
today. It is probably our ability to
create very complex movements
and manipulate objects extremely
accurately, along with our incredible
brains. Our suite of sensors is second
to none if all attributes are gathered
together. Hawks may have keener
vision and can see a mouse scurrying
a mile away. A fox may hear the same
mouse under three feet of snow. A
dog may sense a smell that surpasses
our most sensitive instruments.
However, when our senses are
coupled to our brain, we blow the animal
world away. We can take a request to
locate a tool that we’ve never seen or
even heard of and find it in a pile of junk
in a drawer, just by a simple verbal
description. “Tom, bring me the 3/8”
wrench that is bent at a 45 degree
80 SERVO 10.2008
