By SCOTT DEWING
Published: November 2002

GAAK IS A PREDATOR with a big fang. Like all of us, he feeds on energy. But whereas you and I eat food and let our uniquely designed bodies convert that food into energy that allows us to walk around, to think, and hopefully accomplish a thing or two during the day, Gaak takes a more direct approach. Rather than eating food, Gaak thrusts his metal fang into his prey and sucks the energy right out of it.

Gaak is a robot. He is part of an ongoing experiment at the Magna Science Adventure Center in Rotherham, England where a group of robots like Gaak are being studied to determine whether they can learn from their experiences. The experiment has been described as “an evolutionary arms race for robots” in which the robots are competing for the ultimate prize of energy. The robots have been divided into predators and prey. The prey robots are small gray robots on wheels that get their energy by positioning their solar panels near sources of light. The larger predator robots get their energy by hunting down the prey robots to extract their battery power, which is where Gaak’s metal fang comes in—quite literally.

When I first read about the robotic going-ons at Magna, I thought it was just a cheap rip-off of Battlebots. For those of you who have not experienced the time-wasting pleasure of watching Battlebots on cable television, I’ll save you a precious Saturday afternoon of your life and give a brief description. Battlebots is a modern-day, mechanistic rendition of Gladiator without all the blood and sweat. Competitors place their robots in the ring to do battle to the death. The robots spin, thrust and flip about while trying to eliminate their opponent with various built-in weaponry, such as saw blades, spikes and hammers.

All of the Battlebots’ robots are remote-control operated by their human owners. The Magna robots, on the other hand, operate without any human intervention. They are designed to learn and evolve. Both the predator and prey robots are controlled by computer-powered, neural networks that take input from the robots’ sensors and send output instructions to their drive motors. This is what both enables and controls the robots’ behavior. Most of the sensing on the robots is done using infrared sensors. The robots can “evolve” by uploading their “electronic genes” to a remote computer. The ultimate goal of the experiment is to demonstrate that the robots have the ability to use their accumulated experiences to develop more complex hunting strategies and improved escape routines—a feet that could arguably be described as “intelligence”.

Will there ever be intelligent robots? Noted author and psychologist Steven Pinker, addresses this question in the opening chapter of his book How the Mind Works:

“Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life? I would pay a lot for a robot that could put away the dishes or run simple errands. But I will not have the opportunity in this century, and probably not in the next one either…the gap between robots in imagination and in reality is my starting point because it shows the first step we must take in knowing ourselves: appreciating the fantastically complex design behind the feats of mental life that we take for granted.”

Bill Joy, co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, offers a different opinion in his landmark article for Wired magazine entitled “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”.

“How soon could an intelligent robot be built?” Joy wrote. “The coming advances in computing power seem to make it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small step to a robot species—to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies of itself.”

I agree with Pinker: the human mind is a “fantastically complex design.” But I also agree with Joy’s position that advances in technology and computing power are approaching the capability to replicate the design and function of a human mind.

I don’t think that the question is whether or not there will be artificially intelligent beings in the future. There will be. The important question is: How will this impact human beings?

In his article, Joy shares his realization that, “with the prospect of human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable.”

I don’t find the possibility of artificially intelligent beings replacing the human race sometime in the future particularly alarming. I suppose I’m too preoccupied with the present possibility of the human race destroying itself to worry about that. If we are to be replaced, it’s not going to be a singular event in history—it’s going to be a gradual change, an evolution that began long ago and is carried forward by technological advancements, some of which will be big but most of which will be small yet cumulative.

Another possible scenario is a merger of humans and machines. Perhaps this may be something as metallic and cold as RoboCop or as soft and hot as the Fembots in Austin Powers. Or maybe it would be something totally non-human-looking but programmed with the history and life experiences of a particular human or the entire human race.

In his article for Wired, Joy notes that one of the dreams of robotics is that we will “gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses.” I have no idea how this would work but it adds an interesting dimension to the human v. machine debate.

If in the future we could somehow download our minds into computers with robotic bodies would we still be ourselves? I’m not sure and the question quickly takes one out of the realm of technology and into philosophy. Perhaps computer scientist and futurist Danny Hillis summed it up best when he said, “I’m as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 years old with a body of silicon, I’ll take it.”