Stephen Spielberg's upcoming film "Artificial Intelligence" is set to renew a long-running, centuries old, debate about mechanical brains and whether they may ever become superior to the human mind. Critics say that machines will never actually think in the human sense, only process bewildering amounts of data though.

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Eric Auchard

NEW YORK: Robots are sure to be humanized the same way space aliens were made into huggable, homesick little people in the epic, "E.T: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence." "He is the first robotic child, programmed to love" runs Stephen Spielberg's upcoming film "Artificial Intelligence" advertising promotion.

Life-like robots are everywhere - not just Hollywood movies but in Sony toy dogs, cars that monitor and talk back to drivers, and mechanical eyes managing factory production. The Internet is full of science fiction musings on how machine intelligence might one day overcome the limits of human mind.

Critics say that machines will never actually think in the human sense, only process bewildering amounts of data. Yet, the pace of advances has given naysayers some pause. Debate is stoked by the emergence of powerful tools such as artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and nanotechnology - computers that work at the molecular level. These present both dangers and the potential to transform the human condition.

Ray Kurzweil, an artificial intelligence pioneer, argues that computers are rapidly outstripping human intelligence. "We will reverse-engineer the human brain not simply because it is our destiny but because there is valuable information to be found there that will provide insights in building more intelligent machines," he predicts in a forthcoming book.

To be sure, machines can solve problems with billions, even trillions of variables that no mind could begin to contemplate. But do they think, and daresay, will they ever possess emotions?

Care to notice it or not, but artificial intelligence has become embedded in everyday life. Telephone customer service calls are now often routed automatically using computer-generated voices with life-like personalities. Banks use neural network technology that mimics the human brain to automate decision-making about loan applications.

So far, it's been pretty dumb Artificial intelligence run amok has a long history that stretches back to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

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