Since the ancient times, people have been trying to make statues and, later, machines alive to create an analogy to human. Finally, humanity has achieved that goal and nowadays we are surrounded by automatic mechanisms operated with complicated software. We have stopped to notice how significant their role has become in our lives.
They are no longer fantasy movie characters – they are a new reality.
With a slight decrease in sales during the 1990s, robots have been manufactured for more than twenty years. They were rather expensive to produce earlier, but everything has changed. Besides, today robots are so accurate that can be used for doing almost any kinds of jobs: from performing complicated surgeries to painting pictures. As a result, some people are afraid that robots will take their jobs away, and it’s partly true. Leading companies aim for assigning robots with as many tasks as possible.
Innovations are so rapid that you can’t predict where you’ll see a robot tomorrow and what new abilities it can have. The most recent application is the police officer robot which appeared in Palo Alto, California. A cute egg-shaped sheriff equipped with infrared cameras and sensitive microphones now patrols the streets and attracts selfie-takers. It can call for help and report accidents, and that ensures the quickest reaction from the police station.
Developments in micro robotics are no less striking. RoboBee drones, which are of the size of insects, already work in disaster-affected zones and monitor forest fires. There was a problem of conserving energy, but scientists solved it by making them stick to surfaces when there’s no need to fly. Due to this invention, the tiniest robots can work in medicine and microsurgery.
Making robots as creative and smart as humans is another challenge. When a robot beat the world champion in Go (a board game similar to chess), it was a triumph for the artificial intelligence specialists. The most important thing was that the machine learned to learn. It can play the game with itself, analyze mistakes and memorize them, improving its skills. Humans can no longer compete with robots in chess and Go due to their superior memory and calculation abilities.
“Well, they are clever but they won’t substitute humans in communication”, skeptics said. There are reasons to doubt this argument while the demand for social robots grows rapidly. Machines already teach people to dance and to sing and can understand emotions. Pepper is the most famous social robot now. Banks and hospitals use it due to its friendliness and nice appearance. It’s expected to be applied in health care and post-traumatic training. Such robots do well with elderly people and children. Their weighty advantages are that they can understand many languages and don’t have to rest.
There’s no need to be afraid of robots doing jobs instead of us since we can’t stop it. The automatization increases productivity and robots often perform jobs that people can’t do. We’d better trust them and learn to live and work for hand by hand with the new policemen, nurses, and teachers.
