Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a remarkable technology: it can be used to do everything from recording your dreams on video to teaching you new skills while you sleep. It’s also good for controlling robots, and Israeli researchers have managed to get a robot to move around a room just by thinking about it.
Japan has long held world dominance when it comes to full-body walking humanoid robots. There’s the pioneering Waseda robots, the impressive HRP series, the diminutive but nimble Sony Qrio and Toyota Partner robots, and of course, the country’s most famous emissary: the charismatic, child-size, astronaut-like Honda Asimo, which ambles, runs, and climbs stairs with (almost) perfect precision. Until recently, only South Korea — with its Hubo and Mahru robots — had demonstrated humanoids with legs as impressive as those of their Japanese counterparts.
There is ongoing debate about what constitutes life. Synthetic bacteria for example, are created by man and yet also alive. Some go so far as to say that robot “emotions” may already have occurred—that current robots have not only displayed emotions, but in some ways have experienced them.
“We’re all machines,” says Rodney Brooks author of “Flesh and Machines,” and former director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, “Robots are made of different sorts of components than we are — we are made of biomaterials; they are silicon and steel — but in principle, even human emotions are mechanistic.” A robot’s level of a feeling like sadness could be set as a number in computer code, he said. But isn’t a human’s level of sadness basically a number, too, just a number of the amounts of various neurochemicals circulating in the brain? Why should a robot’s numbers be any less authentic than a human’s?
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