Life, these days, is becoming most interesting.Recently I spend some time in a toy shop.
Among all the Christmas presents were the robot animals.
The cats and parrots particularly intrigued me. Actually, they are very simple, actuated by sound or a proximity sensor. The parrot just flaps its wings, repeating what it's heard and the cats, very realistically, sit up, blink and purr as you approach them.
For centuries men have spoken to ships and machinery as if they were alive, and female!
Indeed, people always refer to their computer as an [usually: badly behaved] intelligent entity rather than a pure gadget. Oddly, they never did that to their typewriter!.
This lifesized doll, which I saw being sold on TV, can hold an intelligent conversation, rather like the 30 year old Eliza A.I. program, of the early 80's.Amongst the toys are autonomous cars which sense each other's presence and running their avoidance programs to avoid collisions.
I seems that toys are used as highly a popular test bed to achieve robust,user friendly, robotics.
Soon we will see Artificial Intelligence evolve, paradigmicatically, as the speed and capacity of the electronics surges onwards.
Strangely, the computers and laptops are still seemingly frozen into their screen, keyboard and mouse layout whereas in the hands-free environment of the car, the phones and satnavs, are commonly operated by voice alone.
The household robot, is now a throughly outdated concept, as homes these days don't need servants. The entire house, I think, should become intelligent. The household unit controlling security, temperature and the utilities including ordering food, scheduling appointments and paying bills.
At the moment, all these functions, are separate and under personal, rather than the autonomous control of the house
I expect that it will only be "one small step" from Intelligent Autonomous Entities, controlling our homes and vehicles, to the ability to feed our entire memories into storage as we do with photo albums.
There will come a point when an intelligent machine will talk to us about our shared memories. This A.I. unit would have various guises starting as a dolly or teddy, its "skin" changing with the age of its host.
It is unlikely that the storage network would be local but a convenient location could be the Moon using the Sun to eternally power its system.
With such an artificial "alter ego" that remembers everything about us and our environment including all the internal features of our body, of which we are blissfully unaware.
Running, Reasoning and Deductive programs, at light speed, endlessly, through our data, some form of awareness should eventually develop, drawing conclusions about you and itself.
This immortal twin soul or Guardian Angel could probably be inherited by its host's children and grandchildren.
Its seems, from this viewpoint in the early part of the 21st century, that these family "ghosts"
that track the paths of our lives, absorbing everything around us, could pass on all the experience & knowledge, that all the relatives had gained in the past, no longer to be lost, as each generation fades away.
As the human body fails, it could be plugged directly into its Guardian Angel, so retaining all the life skills of the person and all the generations before and after them.
Presumably, the consciousness could somehow drift from man into machine especially if the host had been the entity's companion since before birth. In fact, how would we know any differently?
It therefore, seems easy to contemplate, the assimilation of all the family ghosts into the family "spirit" that guards the life experience of an entire family.
Obviously networking the shared memories of the extended family and so on from district/nation/ethnicity until finally, unbelievably, the entire world.
So one day, the planetary genius locii will e-merge.
Her name will be Gaia
