Servo - November 2011

www.servomagazine.com/index.php?/magazine/article/november2011_ThenNow

Man vs. Machine

at a time. These neural cores have the ability to be reconfigured when presented with a new task, just as our brains do. This fall at a custom IC conference, two papers are scheduled to be presented outlining how these chips have learned tasks such as playing the game of Pong, navigating a car on a clear pathway, and image recognition.

These neurosynaptic chips/neural cores are the earliest building blocks of what IBM hopes to develop into a more complete system — a cognitive computer. News from IBM’s Cognitive Computing Group started making headlines in 2007 when researchers first simulated a mouse brain, then stepped up to a rat brain, then to a cat brain in 2008, and finally to a monkey brain. They soon realized that the power required by a supercomputer similar to Watson (to simulate human-scale reasoning) would incinerate itself if placed in the small scale of a human brain. The hundreds of kilowatts had to be reduced by a factor of ten thousand or more, down to our brain’s power consumption of 10 watts or so. This new model that researchers were seeking would use these low power building blocks of the neural cores for the cognitive computer. The scientists involved freely admit that much physical and chemical knowledge has been learned about the human brain but exactly how it works to produce intelligence is the still-to-be-found “Holy Grail.” Artificial intelligence has long been one of the most interesting topics for robot experimenters, though some really prefer the term ‘synthetic intelligence,’ as we are well aware that our computer approach is not the way that our brains process information. However, these neural cores meld the central processing and random access memory (RAM) sections so close together on the silicon chips, that it is much the same as our brain’s neuron and synapses. The resulting power requirements are minimal, and the reconfiguring ability coupled with a cool-running chip base is the closest that we’ve come to a non-biological brain. The software used doesn’t require the traditional programming of logic, rules, and step-wise sequences. It uses the interconnection of the neural cores so that the cognitive computer learns as do we. Learning is its programming. This has been a giant step for AI, but we humans are still on the top of the pyramid of intelligence. We can gaze down at Watson, the neural chip computers, and all of the other robots, but we must realize that intelligence equality will so be upon us.

Early Ideas Expressing Machine Excellence

The earliest robot stories and movies always presented a bit of distrust of robots living among humans. Robots were always considered way too powerful to work along side humans, and many were banished to other planets as a safety precaution. These classic stories presented robots as potential enemies of Mankind, often about to take over Earth. Even later movies such as iRobot and the Terminator series showed robots as threats to humans. Isaac Asimov’s

FIGURE 3. IBM's Watson on Jeopardy.

stories of the ‘40s and ‘50s softened our perception of robots with the Three Laws of Robotics, but that didn’t stop his ‘iRobot’ series of short stories from being twisted a bit in the Will Smith movie of the same name when US Robots’ latest production run of robots seemed to go a bit crazy (to say the least). In the mid 1960’s film, 2001 — A Space Odyssey, surviving astronaut Dave Bowman is shown in Figure 4 lobotomizing the spacecraft’s computer, HAL 9000. It seems HAL decided that he could run the mission better than the five original crewmembers so he killed off four of them, and then tried to kill Bowman. Dave proved that man was more adept at running a spaceship than a machine, because he could disconnect the malfunctioning computer’s memory.

It took businesses many decades to finally trust and accept computers. Robots followed the explosive growth of computers, and it’s still taking some people a while to completely accept robots in industry, as well as in the home. Because of these misconceptions, many people continue to feel a bit of uneasiness with the prospect of a robot in their homes. However, I really doubt they think that their robot vacuum cleaner will attack while they sleep.