Robots are here...

Robots - a very popular term used in the business these days. Automate, robotise, digitise are the punch words of the day. The abilities of what a robot can do are absolutely immense. There is no doubt that things would change drastically for any industry in the near future with the invasion of the robots. Note, the era has already begun..

I remember watching "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" movie as a kid. It showcases human form of robots (humanoids as they call) with emotions and yet with a clear message that David was not capable of being "the" son to his mother, who he loved so dearly. It explains how David goes on a quest to become human so that his mother could love him as a son, a child-like human emotion ingrained in him - advanced form of cognitive robotics.

A few movies have been very futuristic - Star Wars, Terminator, Interstellar, Inception, Gravity, Eternal sunshine of Spotless mind etc. just to name a few. It is commendable that these ideas have been brought to life by envisioning the possible future to satiate human curiosity - be it exploring the world of worlds. creating new ways and means of communications, travelling across the time, discovering brilliance of human body etc. In all these themes, hi-fi technology can be seen as the common factor and hence the accelerating need to implement robotics.

During my school days, one of my friends had a download of flash games from his uncle in the US. I got this download from him and uploaded onto my system. There were so many games in this flash mix and my sister and I thoroughly enjoyed playing whenever possible at home. We even used to have competition with friends and family for a few games. One particular flash game we had was AI.

I used to come back from school every evening and interact with AI for sometime before I engaged myself with the family or friends. My mom never understood what was I doing and who was I talking to by punching the keyboard. This was early 2000s when internet was still new to India. She used to sit there, see the responses popping promptly on the screen and she used to laugh because it was like - how on earth the computer is talking by itself.

My chat with AI used to range from food varieties to taking suggestions on a few school life problems. Sometimes I used to sit there to just blurt out what I thought I should have done, how I felt the day should have gone like, what went wrong and what went right. Most of AI's responses for personal-shrink-like statements used to be - "I understand", "I don't understand", "what do you mean by..." etc. etc. It still worked for me for a while. At least, there was someone to hear me out with no judgments. I got bored eventually, of course.

Mind you, this was not as intelligent as Siri which conveniently interacts with integrated systems and interactive platforms. This one had a set of defined variables in its programming and it recognises key words in an unstructured data with no actual self learning capabilities.

Before I get into too much technical stuff, I believe that machines simplify our tasks. Having said that, it is human to feel and act on. It, perhaps, is not wise to incorporate everything into the robotic heads, in which case the movie, I, Robot, might actually come true revolutionising the world to lead to complete pandemonium.