Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

I think that robots can do certain things that humans can do but cannot do everything a human can do. A robot can easily calculate digits in mathematical equations, match fingerprints through a database, and search for duplicates in a massive one million search of objects. This is because of programming done by humans to the robots. Robots cannot think abstract as well as a human currently since humans program the robots and not every single detail can be programmed into a robot about something in particular (favorite book etc.) In the article The Huggable: A Therapeutic Robotic Companion for Relational, Affective Touch, it states: “In the first mode, the Huggable will be interacting with people, responding to the affective content of their touch with appropriate reactions.” I think that this is a huge leap in technology and it can show that you can make a robot think.

I think that a robotic car can be both a great idea and a bad idea at the same time. In the article Shut your eyes and drive, it says: “Autonomous cars capable of sensing their surroundings and avoiding collision are already taking to the streets. Equipped with powerful computers and sensors, these vehicles promise to help ease the strain of driving and reduce jams on our over-burdened roads.” That is a great idea because it can help with going places without creating stress on the driver. The problems that I see with robotic cars is that they can malfunction and crash which would never be a good thing. The other problem that I see is that they might take unnecessary long routes if the GPS decides to not take a certain street and ends up going around.

I think that robots are more likely to make errors than humans for different reasons. A robot can only do what it is programmed to do and if it gets a certain operation/instruction that it cannot do, it will create an error. Humans can sometimes forget something and cause an error too, but robots can completely go haywire on certain illegal operations or errors. For example, if an error happens in MS-DOS, sometimes it messes up the whole operating system and you need to shut down because nothing will work until you reboot.