In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Person

From Arnold Schwartzenegger'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 these fictional creations? In this sweeping look at state-of-the-art breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, robotics, computer science, and other hi-tech industries, Maureen Caudill reveals how close we are to achieving artificial vision, language recognition, problem solving, memory, and other requisites of intelligent robots. 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 perform other feats of dexterity. 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 perfected, Caudill warns, there will likely be some unexpected--and perhaps unpleasant--social changes. Androids may compete with human workers for jobs--and will never call in sick. They may also entangle our legal system in complex, difficult ways: 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--to "kill" it? 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.