IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 15

FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK

Eugenio
Guglielmelli

Robots
Don't Pray

istorically, the evolution of research in
the areas of robotics
and artificial intelligence (AI) has always
been related, although with different
intensity through the years. The concept of AI was originally developed
around the basic idea of an artificial mind, mainly capable of formal,
logical analysis of structured knowledge, and designed to be embedded in computational systems.
Until the 1980s, a benchmark for
an artificial mind was beating the
world's best chess player, without
any need to generate and control
movements and forces in the real
world. The famous Turing test was
about the capability of a computer
to give correct, humanlike answers
to ordinary questions - while being
hidden behind a curtain. Then just a
few years ago that a computer won
a popular television show providing correct answers to a variety of
questions directly interpreted from
natural spoken language. Actually,
Turing himself proposed a variety of
visionary scenarios where the body,
not just the mind, was part of the
process of developing intelligence.
Along this line, a milestone for both
robotics and AI research domains
was the seminal paper by Rodney
A. Brooks, "Elephants Don't Play
Chess" [1], which stated that perception could be turned into action

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without the need of abstract, formal
mediation and logical reasoning. It
was the genesis of reactive robotics: perception and, progressively,
embodiment became the central
focus of an increasing portion of
robotics research, the basis for the
development of machines capable
of synthesizing and adapting their
behavior in real time to their working environment. In summary, it
has taken a while but, eventually,
the artificial mind and the artificial
body are being considered of equal
importance when dealing with the
problem of developing humanlike
intelligent systems.
Of note, in the last decades,
there has been increasing attention posed by heterogeneous
communities to concepts such
as technological singularity (i.e.,
artificial overcoming human intelligence), artificial life, transhumanism, and immortality. In principle
this is in line with the visions
about cybernetic systems originally proposed by Wiener, Turing, and
others back in the mid of the 20th
century. What is new in these old

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2461173
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

september 2015

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

speculations, which were previously confined to science fiction,
is that they are now supposed
to be systematically pursued by
exploiting the expected advancements of AI, robotics, and automation technology for building a new
type of agent, featuring different
levels of integration between biological and artificial components.
For instance, the 2045 initiative
(www.2045.com) has developed a
roadmap for achieving the implant
of a human brain in an artificial
body by that year; the Singularity and Humanity+ initiatives are
planning to run universities worldwide and sponsor research projects to groups joining the overall
philosophy and sharing the vision
of immortality enabled by technology, which is in parallel somehow elaborated from a theoretical,
transdisciplinary perspective.
To some extent, this seems a
kind of new religion: you need to
be a follower in order to be part
of an effort apparently supported
not just by some groups of naïve
researchers, but also by large

15
http://www.2045.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015
