VISIONS OF A ROBOT DREAM - Part 1

VISIONS OF A ROBOT DREAM - Part 1
Hi everybody!! After a humongous hiatus, I am back to blogging this summer. Long gone are those days of movie based blogs. I strongly feel that there are a lot more unimportant but pressing issues that could be expressed here. This doesn't mean that I shall not be covering movies any longer, it just means that I have adjusted my field of vision for a more panoramic view.

Currently, I have been actively interested in neural networks. Just to refresh your memory, neurons are electrically excitable cells in the nervous system whose main function is to process and transmit information. Neurons are typically composed of three main parts: a soma, or cell body, a dendritic tree and an axon. Every neuron is an open-loop control system by itself, where the neuron receives input via its soma or dendritic tree and provides an output via the axon. An area of intense research is not just to understand the properties of an individual neuron but also to understand how millions of neurons interact with one another to realize intelligent systems.

Recent research has explored using cultures of neurons as computing devices. One device used to study biological neural networks is a Multi-Electrode Array (MEA): “a specialized tissue culture dish in which living neurons can be grown over multiple stimulation and recording electrodes”. These electrodes enable recording signals generated by the neuron cell culture and also provide a means to stimulate the cell culture. In order to “train” these cultures, a system to measure and stimulate culture electrical activity is needed. After “training” the neuron cell culture, fusing it with various control system techniques can make it act as the “brain” of an engineered system.

With some imagination, anybody can easily see the scope of the field and its unmistakable connection with the positronic brain. For the uninformed Wikipedia quotes, "a positronic brain is a fictional technological device, originally conceived by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Its role is to serve as a central computer for a robot, and, in some unspecified way, to provide it with a form of consciousness recognizable to humans. When Asimov wrote his first robot stories in 1939/1940, the positron was a newly discovered particle and so the buzz word positronic, coined by analogy with electronic, added a contemporary gloss of popular science to the concept."

Being an avid reader of Isaac Asimov, I wonder whether he ever considered his positronic brain to be biological in nature. Because in case we do succeed in developing a fully functional neural network to act as a brain for an engineering system, aren't we creating a new biological entity? The birth of a new species? Fused with robotics, could this lead to the development of robots that Asimov conceived in his books? Though the research in the field of neural networks is relatively in its infancy, if neural networks could be trained to perform complex tasks then the answer to the above questions would definitely be a "yes". This obviously raises many questions on the social impact of this research but most importantly this one: "If these bio-electro-mechanical entities ever come to exist, should they be given their own rights?"

Vehemently adhering to the nature of a blog and from the fear of turning this entry into a lecture, I shall address the issues of "robot rights" in tomorrow's blog. Until then I shall leave these issues for you to ponder over the night.

Transmission complete - Amrith