Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us. In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans benefit (...) from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever. In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine. (shrink)

Computers have far to go to match human strengths, and our estimates will depend on analogy and extrapolation. Fortunately, these are grounded in the first bit of the journey, now behind us. Thirty years of computer vision reveals that 1 MIPS can extract simple features from real-time imagery--tracking a white line or a white spot on a mottled background. 10 MIPS can follow complex gray-scale patches--as smart bombs, cruise missiles and early self-driving vans attest. 100 MIPS can follow moderately unpredictable (...) features like roads--as recent long NAVLAB trips demonstrate. 1,000 MIPS will be adequate for coarse-grained three-dimensional spatial awareness--illustrated by several mid-resolution stereoscopic vision programs, including my own. 10,000 MIPS can find three-dimensional objects in clutter--suggested by several "bin-picking" and high-resolution stereo-vision demonstrations, which accomplish the task in an hour or so at 10 MIPS. The data fades there--research careers are too short, and computer memories too small, for significantly more elaborate experiments. (shrink)

Exploration and colonization of the universe await, but Earth‐adapted biological humans are ill equipped to respond to the challenge. Machines have gone farther and seen more, limited though they presently are by insect‐like behavioral inflexibility.

The unprecedented opportunities for experiments in complexity presented by the first modern computers in the late 1940's raised hopes in early computer scientists (eg. John von Neumann and Alan Turing) that the ability to think, our greatest asset in our dealings with the world, might soon be understood well enough to be duplicated. Success in such an endeavor would extend mankind's mind in the same way that the development of energy machinery extended his muscles.

In recent years the mushrooming power, functionality and ubiquity of computers and the Internet have outstripped early forecasts about technology's rate of advancement and usefulness in everyday life. Alert pundits now foresee a world saturated with powerful computer chips, which will increasingly insinuate themselves into our gadgets, dwellings, apparel and even our bodies.

The last few years have been good for time machines. Kip Thorne's renowned general relativity group at Caltech invented a new quantum gravitational approach to building a time gate, and, in an international collaboration, gave a plausible rebuttal of "grandfather paradox" arguments against time travel. Another respected group suggested time machines that exploit quantum mechanical time uncertainty. The technical requirements for these suggestions exceed our present capabilities, but each new approach seems less onerous than the last. There is hope yet (...) that time travel will eventually become possible, even cheap. (shrink)

Folk psychology is under threat - that is to say - our everyday conception that human beings are agents who experience the world in terms of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings and who deliberate, make plans, and generally execute actions on the basis of their beliefs, needs and wants - is under threat. This threat is evidenced in intellectual circles by the growing attitude amongst some cognitive scientists that our common sense categories are in competition with connectionist theories and (...) modern neuroscience. It is often thought that either folk psychology or modern cognitive science must go. It is in these terms that the battle lines of today's philosophy of mind are drawn. (shrink)

This paper describes some components of a working system which drives a vehicle through cluttered real world environments under computer control, guided by images perceived through an onboard television camera. The emphasis is on reliable and fast low level visual techniques which determine the existence and location of objects in the world, but do not identify them. They include an interest operator for choosing distinctive regions in images, a correlator for finding matching regions in similar images, a geometric camera solver (...) which determines camera displacement and distance to objects from motion stereo information and an automatic distortion corrector which compensates for camera imperfections. (shrink)

Exploration and colonization of the universe awaits, but earth-adapted biological humans are ill-equipped to respond to the challenge. Machines have gone farther and seen more, limited though they presently are by insect-like behavioral inflexibility. As they become smarter over the coming decades, space will be theirs. Organizations of robots of ever increasing intelligence and sensory and motor ability will expand and transform what they occupy, working with matter, space and time. As they grow, a smaller and smaller fraction of their (...) territory will be undeveloped frontier. Competitive success will depend more and more on using already available matter and space in ever more refined and useful forms. The process, analogous to the miniaturization that makes today's computers a trillion times more powerful than the mechanical calculators of the past, will gradually transform all activity from grossly physical homesteading of raw nature, to minimum-energy quantum transactions of computation. The final frontier will be urbanized, ultimately into an arena where every bit of activity is a meaningful computation: the inhabited portion of the universe will transformed into a cyberspace. (shrink)

The thoughts presented here never appeared in research proposals, but nevertheless grew at the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory over the years 1971 through 1980 under support from the National Institutes of Health, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and more recently at the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute under Office of Naval Research contract number N00014-81-K-0503.

Serious attempts to build thinking machines began after the second world war. One line of research, called Cybernetics, used electronic circuitry imitating nervous systems to make machines that learned to recognize simple patterns, and turtle-like robots that found their way to recharging plugs. A different approach, named Artificial Intelligence, harnessed the arithmetic power of post-war computers to abstract reasoning, and by the 1960s made computers prove theorems in logic and geometry, solve calculus problems and play good games of checkers. At (...) the end of the 1960s, research groups at MIT and Stanford attached television cameras and robot arms to their computers, so "thinking" programs could begin to collect information directly from the real world. (shrink)

Following the cart meeting of June 13, in which it was agreed that McCarthy would buy the cart project a TV transmitter if I could demonstrate my ability to do work on vision by writing a program which extracted three dimensional information from a motion stereo sequence of pictures, I began work on this task. So that there would be no doubt as to who had done the work, and because I operate most comfortably and effectively in a programming environment (...) made to my own tastes, the first order of business was the writing of a set of graphics and picture utility routines. The resulting package provides more flexibility than Quam's III buffer based routines, and is more cohesive than Baumgart's set, which is spread out among several programs. Currently the package accesses Data Disc displays only, in future it will be extended to provide output to the XGP and maybe the III's. As an example of increased capabilities, it allows display of filled in polygons, and permits displays to be shrunk or expanded arbitrarily merely by changing the declared dimensions of the screen or the requested sizes of the individual parts. Also, selected areas of the display may be erased or complemented, as well as added to. The programs described below use no previously existing software other than the FAIL and SAIL compilers and the operating system. (shrink)

Chapter 7 of Robot was my first presentation of a surprising chain of reasoning. I wanted to rewrite it, but didn't have the energy in time for publication. Now that the pressure is off, and my visceral comfort with the ideas has risen, I'd like to present them more compellingly. This piece is a start.

The basic terminal is externally a box with a keyboard and some connectors and a few lights and switches. The connectors are for power, modem or phone line, video out, audio out, rf out (audio and video modulated onto a tv carrier), I/O bus (or unibus). It should be as light and compact as possible.

Computers have invaded everyday life, and networked machines are worming their way into our gadgets, dwellings, clothes, even bodies. But if pervasive computing soon handles most of our information needs, it will still not clean the floors, take out the garbage, assemble kit furniture or do any of a thousand other other essential physical tasks. The old dream of mechanical servants will remain mostly unmet.

Computers were invented recently to mechanize tedious manual informational procedures. Such procedures were themselves invented only during the last ten millennia, as agricultural civilizations outgrew village-scale social instincts. The instincts arose in our hominid ancestors during several million years of life in the wild, and were themselves built on perceptual and motor mechanisms that had evolved in a vertebrate lineage spanning hundreds of millions of years.

Bedazzled by the explosion of computers into everyday life, pundits predict a world saturated by communicating chips, in our gadgets, dwellings, clothes, even bodies. But if pervasive computing handles most of our information needs, it will still not clean the floors, take out the garbage, assemble kit furniture or do any of a thousand other other essential physical tasks. The old dream of mechanical servants will remain unmet.

After decades of commercial stagnation, robotics seems to be at a turning point. A half dozen companies have introduced small domestic robot vacuum cleaners, with sufficient market success to fuel the development of more advanced follow-ons. Hundreds of thousands of Sony's advanced AIBO..

The evidence grid representation was formulated at the CMU Mobile Robot Laboratory in 1983 to turn wide angle range measurements from cheap mobile robot-mounted sonar sensors into detailed spatial maps. It accumulates diffuse evidence about the occupancy of a grid of small volumes of nearby space from individual sensor readings into increasingly confident and detailed maps of a robot's surroundings. It worked surprisingly well in first implementation for sonar navigation in cluttered rooms. In the past decade its use has been (...) extended to range measurements from stereoscopic vision and other sensors, sonar in very difficult specular environments, and other contexts. The most dramatic extension yet, from 2D grid maps with thousands of cells to 3D grids with millions, is underway. (shrink)

Our first tools, sticks and stones, were very different from ourselves. But many tools now resemble us, in function or form, and they are beginning to have minds. A loose parallel with our own evolution suggests how they may develop in future. Computerless industrial machinery exhibits the behavioral flexibility of single-celled organisms. Today's best computer-controlled robots are like the simpler invertebrates. A thousand-fold increase in computer power in this decade should make possible machines with reptile-like sensory and motor competence. Growing (...) computer power over the next half century will allow robots that learn like mammals, model their world like primates and eventually reason like humans. Depending on your point of view, humanity will then have produced a worthy successor, or transcended inherited limitations and transformed itself into something quite new. No longer limited by the slow pace of human learning and even slower biological evolution, intelligent machinery will conduct its affairs on an ever faster, ever smaller scale, until coarse physical nature has been converted to fine-grained purposeful thought. (shrink)

In the early 1970s, doing simple computer stereoscopic vision, it became rapidly obvious that the computer power in our mainframe PDP-10 was hugely insufficient to do even that basic function in real time, implying that doing the job of the whole nervous system was even further out of reach. Besides enormously more speed, we needed enormously more memory.

Very encouraging results have been obtained from a new program that derives a dense three-dimensional evidence grid representation of a robot's surroundings from wide-angle stereoscopic images. The pro gram adds several spatial rays of evidence to a grid for each of about 2,500 local image features chosen per stereo pair. It was used to construct a 256x256x64 grid, representing 6 by 6 by 2 meters, from a hand- collected test set of twenty stereo image pairs of an office scene. Fifty (...) nine stereo pairs of an 8 by 8 meter laboratory were also processed. The positive (probably occupied) cells of the grids, viewed in perspec tive, resemble dollhouse scenes. Details as small as the curvature of chair armrests are discernible. The processing time, on a 100 MIPS Sparc 20, is less than five seconds per stereo pair, and total memory is under 16 megabytes. The results seem abundantly adequate for very reliable navigation of freely roaming mobile robots, and plausibly adequate for shape identification of objects bigger than 10 centimeters. The program is a first proof of concept, and awaits optimizations, enhancements, variations, extensions and applications. (shrink)

The most consistently interesting stories are those about journeys, and the most fascinating organisms are those that move from place to place. I think these observations are more than idiosyncrasies of human psychology, but illustrate a fundamental principle. The world at large has great diversity, and a traveller constantly encounters novel circumstances, and is consequently challenged to respond in new ways. Organisms and mechanisms do not exist in isolation, but are systems with their environments, and those on the prowl in (...) general have a richer environment than those rooted to one place. (shrink)

It is the year 20-something--we don't know the exact date yet, but figure 20 to 50 years from today--and your doctor has just given you some really bad news. That nasty little pain in your lower abdomen turns out be serious. The doctor explains to you with great tact and kindness that, although medicine can now fix almost everything that can go wrong with the human body, there remain one or two really ferocious ailments that cannot be cured. You won't (...) be in pain, he says. You won't even be bedridden, except at the very end--but the fact is that you have just six months left to live. (shrink)

The project is funded by the Office of Naval Research under a contract entiltled Underwater Robots. The effort is interesting in its own right, and complements projects involving underwater vehicles such as those at the University of New Hampshire and the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego. These other efforts are interesting to us, but we feel they are incomplete. Their current control systems are very simple, typically incorporating quite small programs on one or a few microprocessors and implementing (...) simple dead reckoning navigation or terrain following behavior. (shrink)

Senses evolved to when the world was wild, enabling our ancestors to detect subtle passing opportunities and dangers. Senses are less useful in a tamer world, where our interactions become more and more simple information exchanges. Senses, and the instincts using them, are increasingly liabilities, demanding entertainment rather than providing useful services. The anachronism will become more apparent as virtual realities, prosthetic sense organs and brain to computer interfaces become common. Imagine reading a computer screen if your eyes and visual (...) cortex are artificial prostheses. It would be far better to bypass all the sensory processing, and insert the message from the computer directly into the thinking portions of your brain. In such manner all our senses will become obsolete, as our physical environment is inexorably refined from a rough physical place into a densely interconnected cyberspace. (shrink)

Summarizing a surrounding 200 pages, pages 179 to 190 of Shadows of the Mind contain a future dialog between a human identified as "Albert Imperator" and an advanced robot, the "Mathematically Justified Cybersystem", allegedly Albert's creation. The two have been discussing a Gödel sentence for an algorithm by which a robot society named SMIRC certifies mathematical proofs. The sentence, referred to in mathematical notation as Omega(Q*), is to be precisely constructed from on a definition of SMIRC's algorithm. It can be (...) interpreted as stating "SMIRC's algorithm cannot certify this statement." The robot has asserted that SMIRC never makes mistakes. If so, SMIRC's algorithm cannot certify the Goedel sentence, for that would make the statement false. But, if they can't certify it, what is says is true! Humans can understand it is true, but mighty SMIRC cannot certify it. The dialog ends melodramatically as the robot, apparently unhinged by this revelation, claims to be a messenger of god, and the human shuts it down with a secret control. (shrink)