The tools to create
have only just become available to all, certainly in the last few years.
I've been dreaming of robots for more than 30 years, but only really in the last year has the hardware become available, or come down in price to put it into the range of a casual hobbyist. I'm a bit more serious than that, especially now I can get my hands on tiny camera boards, and tiny servos that can lift kilos, and more importantly access to things like Arduino, RasPi and their communities.
The hardware was twice the size a few years ago, lifted only a kilo or so and needed a thumping mains PSU, but this year I've built a biologically-inspired robot containing 6.4GHz mobile processing, 20 servos, stereo cameras and the batteries to run it all, and it stands about 1 foot 6 inches on all fours. I've spent less than 100 on its hardware too, the CPU board was scrap and the servos were 2 each from a Chinese eBayer, the rest is aluminium sheet (25, the most expensive), various plastic bits and nuts, bolts and rivets. Webcams cost under 10 each, and microcontrollers half that.
I'm now working on making it smart. It was hard enough making it see - judge distance and recognise objects - but getting context out of it is harder than I thought.
There's things like OpenCV to handle vision as an API, Kinect, neural modelling software and all sorts on the web, but nothing to do something as general as thinking.
I'd buy Kurzweil's book, but I'd like to bet theres not a lot of code in there among the philosophy - and you need a liberal helping of both to do what the title suggests...
Speaking of philosophy, one thing that Kurzweil mentions is that we shouldnt fear the future because we're already in a human-machine society. I saw an advert earlier on tv that highlighted just that. It was for a camera, billed as containing 'David Bailey' - or at least as much expertise. It wasnt so long ago that only expert humans could take consistently good photographs, and a machine that could was considered nothing less than AI. And yet this compact camera has absorbed everything that poor Mr Bailey was, and now all he can do is advertise it. Its just a camera, and most of us have a phone with more photographic knowledge built into it than average joe knows. I'd have been shocked 20 years ago to have bee told that we all carry video recorders as a matter of course today.
AI becomes invisible pretty quickly when its applied, and isnt scary for long. Unless its your job its after of course...
