num_pages: 242
description: From Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator to C-3PO of the Star Wars trilogy to the comic robot-butler in Woody Allen's Sleeper  the android has long been a familiar figure on the American imaginative landscape. But how far removed from reality are such fictitious creations? Will there everbe an intelligent robot in our future? Neural networks expert Maureen Caudill says yes. In fact she argues that the development of intelligent androids is a mere twenty years away.In Our Own Image reveals just how far we've come in developing an intelligent robot describes what technical obstacles must still be cleared and--perhaps most interesting of all--outlines the potentially massive social disruptions and tangled moral and legal dilemmas these human machineswill cause. In a sweeping look at state-of-the-art breakthroughs in artificial intelligence robotics computer science psychology and neural networks Caudill shows how these fields have advanced machine vision language recognition problem solving memory and other requisites of intelligentrobots. She describes foot-long mechanical ants that can follow you around a room robots that can crack eggs shear sheep play ping-pong tighten wing-nuts and other feats of dexterity. (One robot WABOT-2 developed in Japan can read simple sheet music and played the electric organ with the NHKSymphony Orchestra of Japan.) electric organ.) And she concludes that as our ability to make faster smaller cheaper computers blends with our ability to mimic the behavior of the human mind the first truly intelligent machines come closer to fruition. But once an android has been perfectedCaudill warns there will likely be some unexpected--and perhaps unpleasant--social changes. Androids may compete with human workers for jobs--and robots won't take vacations won't have family problems and might never leave the firm. Androids may also entangle our legal system in complexdifficult Can an individual own an intelligent android? What rights should it have in society? Does ownership of an android imply the right to turn it off--the right to kill it? And does such ownership brand us as slaveholders?The existence of intelligent androids will provoke these and other questions. Caudill concludes that we will soon be forced to come up with answers if we are to learn to share the world with another intelligent species--one of our own creation.
language: English
title: In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Person
publisher: Oxford University Press