• Question: Do you think that in the future a robot could be made as powerful as a human?

    Asked by cliffordhwh to David on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: David Corne

      David Corne answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      If by “powerful” you mean physical strength, then we already have robots much more powerful. But these are completely remote controlled by humans or programmed to do a very specific set of things. They make cars and that kind of thing. You might be talking about “autonomous” robots – meaning robots that are left on their own to make their own decisions. As you can imagine, it might be very dangerous to make an autonomous robot too powerful. These things will always be programmed to be ‘nice’, but it is too easy for programs to have errors and bugs; also, hackers might do nasty things. So, we won’t see physically strong autonomous robots for a long time, until we have some way to completely trust their programming.

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