Moravec's hypothetical robots also launch into the cosmos as colonizers, transferring whole industries into outer space. Moravec dares to dream of a trillion-fingered medical robot whose molecular interventions allow it to act as diagnostic instrument, surgeon and medicine, and of quantum computers that make time travel conceivable. In this remarkable report, Moravec may have looked deeper into some aspects of the future than anyone else. Copyright 1998, Publishers Weekly. This optimism may seem facile, but Moravec, a founder of the Robotics Program at Carnegie Mellon University, marshals plenty of support for his audacious thesis.
Robots are currently in use for security guard duty and delivering meals in hospitals.
While problems with cost and reliability persist, Moravec argues that future advances will overcome these liabilities. At that point, we will be on the verge of a science-fictional utopia, a long and graceful era of retirement for the human race before the machines replace us entirely. All rights reserved. With computer power increasing exponentially, Moravec regards the emergence of machine intelligence as inevitable, and, quite sanguine about the prospect, he clearly explains the software ideas that would allow it. Moravec opens with Alan Turing's seminal theories of computing and then describes the difficulties the first robot engineers encountered in getting simple robots to cross a room.