Computers and Robots

by Mariko Doskow, 13, US

How many machines did you use today? Think about it for a moment. Maybe you listened to some new music or watched your favorite TV shows. Maybe you fried up some eggs for breakfast. Maybe you chatted with some friends online. Tally it up and you realize that you use a lot of machines everyday. Machines and computers have managed to integrate themselves into almost every profession. Doctors use them every time they go to their offices. Teachers, lawyers, and technicians do, too. In fact, computers and machines are everywhere you go.

Think about something else for a minute. When was it that personal computers became popular? Not very long ago, computers didn't even exist! If this is how far computers can go in less than fifty years, imagine what will be commonplace in another fifty years. Computers will probably have been reduced to paper-thin screens with touch-type keyboards and a mouse unit right on the screen. There will be chips smaller than a bumblebee's body implanted in peoples' brains which would provide instant access to huge stores of information. There would be computers which could scan a body for medical problems and tell the doctor what was wrong so that they should fix the problem.

There will also be robots with limited intelligence (approximately that of a parrot, perhaps): robot teachers, robot mechanics, robot janitors, robot nurses, robot butlers. By the time I'm forty, there will be so many robots that they will be under the same category of "numerous" as Starbucks coffee shops.

I can imagine going to college with my brand new brain implant. I go to school and head to my first class: advanced math taught by a calculus A.I. (artificial intelligence) tutoring unit. Some new concepts are explained using information downloaded from the calculus A.I. unit to my touch-screen. The A.I. unit asks if anyone has any questions. No one has any questions? All right. It assigns our homework and dismisses us to our next class. Biology was, of course, taught by a biology A.I. tutoring unit. At the end of the day, I drive home in a used hovercar (middle-class college students like me still can't afford a new car) and order my butler A.I. unit to heat up some Chinese chow for dinner. I lean back and download the calculus lesson into my brain. Then I practice a few sample problems from each concept to make sure I understand everything. I got it down pat thanks to that handy little chip in my head.

It sounds pretty nice having more intelligent computers and robots around to help: it takes barely any effort at all on your part. It's a future I'm looking forward to seeing. There are just a couple of things I hope everyone will keep in mind when creating an A.I. unit. One, do not let any A.I. unit have the ability to reproduce itself independently. Two, never let your A.I. become too intelligent. We do not want an uprising of A.I.s and intelligent computers trying to take control of our world. That, however, is a whole different essay.