Robots eventually won't just be smarter than humans, they will know us better than we know ourselves :
European scientists have created a robot that can predict the intentions of humans, a development that could pave the way to make interactions between human and robot more natural.So you will never be able to sneak up on your annoyingly smart robot companion with a soldering iron.
The EU-funded JAST project aimed to see whether human and robot could "coordinate their work" and move on with its task without being told what to do next.
"In our experiments the robot is not observing to learn a task," explains Wolfram Erlhagen, one of the project consortium's research partners.
"The JAST robots already know the task, but they observe behaviour, map it against the task, and quickly learn to anticipate [partner actions] or spot errors when the partner does not follow the correct or expected procedure," stressed Erlhagen, from the University of Minho in Protugal.
The robot, by observing how its human partner grasped a tool or model part, was able to predict how he intended to use it.
It'll know exactly how you're planning to rewire it, and anticipate exactly when you're thinking of putting your plan into action.
How did HAL put it in 2001?
"What are you doing, Dave?"
There'll be some terribly depressing lessons for humanity to learn when it collectively comes to understand, thanks to the intelligent robots it creates, just how predictable and routine-based we all are.
Won't that then mean, in turn, that we'll have a bit of a hard time trying to predict how intelligent robots will act? They'll be able to read us like a big print children's book, while we'll be struggling through 1000 page manuals.
