HindustanTimes Fri,11 Jul 2014


Intelligent robots may overtake humans by end of 21st century
Washington, May 09, 2013
First Published: 14:00 IST(9/5/2013)
Last Updated: 14:04 IST(9/5/2013)
Honda Motor Co.'s revamped human-shaped robot "Asimo" uses a Japanese sign language during a news conference at the Japanese automaker's research facility in Wako, near Tokyo. Asimo can now run faster, balance itself on uneven surfaces, hop on one foot, pour a drink and even almost "think" on its own.
The idea of superintelligent machines may sound like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but many experts say that the idea isn't far-fetched.
Some even think the singularity -- the point at which artificial intelligence can match, and then overtake, human smarts -- might happen in just 16 years, Discovery News reported.
In his book 'The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology' (Viking, 2005), futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that computers will be as smart as humans by 2029, and that by 2045, "computers will be billions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence," Kurzweil wrote in an email to LiveScience.
Bill Hibbard, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, doesn't make quite as bold a prediction, but he's nevertheless confident AI will have human-level intelligence some time in the 21st century.
While AI can trounce the best chess or Jeopardy player and do other specialized tasks, it's still light-years behind the average 7-year-old in terms of common sense, vision, language and intuition about how the physical world works, Ernest Davis, a computer scientist at New York University said.

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