Technological Singularity - Robots

A few days ago I was at the doctor's office, and because my my doctor was apparently late, I had a lot of time to read magazines. I stumbled upon an article about how robotics are improving, and while it was mainly an article about how the improvement of robots may/might possibly result in the reduction of human workers, which would having us end up even less employment. While that, of course is a problem, it also has a small list on unique and advanced but experimental robots that are beyond what most people think the status of robots are today (certainly beyond what I thought anyway), and the list is what I'll mainly be talking about.

We've all seen movies and maybe a bit of games but mostly movies about advanced robotic intelligence that is capable of been seen as almost human or even inputting themselves into human culture without any sort of detection. Movies like I,Robot, Terminator, Alien, and even The Matrix series are popular titles that showcase this idea very well, however in most of them robotic life is often portrayed as being evil, or easily sabotaged. Of the 4 titles, I,Robot is the best display of what the list in the article I read listed off, in the movie it is shown that robots serve mainly as a support role rather than a human role in people's lives. In the small list it mentioned a few different types of robots of note that serve as similar role such as :

-A robot that acts as a librarian in a university whose name escapes me at the moment, it's main features are that it is able to retrieve books and deliver them efficiently and quickly.

-Taxi Robot that actually was created by Google, it is able to perform the same role as a Taxi Driver of course.

-Militaristic Robots, I don't entirely remember the precise notes about this section, but the idea is that while we do have remote controlled military tools, the next step up would be artificial intelligence that would be able to completely take the role of a soldier, and be put into harm's way instead.

-Robotic Tour Guide who is able to take people for a specified tour and provide “humorous” commentary.

All four of these robots take some sort of job and directly go for having the AI of the robot be able to do it as well as a human being, while their functions are limited to doing those jobs, and they don't really do much else, there are other robots who apparently do more advanced human-like things. However, the main purpose of this isn't to theorize about how robots may start to become too intelligent and take over the world, instead I wonder what an advancement in this field of science would mean for gaming.

The first most basic sort of robot to me would be one that is able to function on it's own and be able to perform a task well with very minimal human support. This is more akin to something like a car or a fan, but that's what I think a “basic” robot would be. Things such as talking to people, developing a personality, learning, or remembering would be more advanced things. When applied to gaming, a basic form of gaming robot would simply be able to play a game, maybe not even well, it would basically be a AI player character that has a body in reality. An advanced form of gaming robot however would be a lot more interesting, in my mind it would be able to basically fulfill the same role as another player sitting next to you, as well as being able to resemble a person somewhat, then again by the time anyone starts to make robots designed for gaming, science will have probably created more advanced forms of AI already.

It is possibly possible for robotics to be a part of our gaming lives sooner than people think especially with how far robot technology has come, if people would want that is another question, especially since we would have to start with the basic form of robot, and that probably wouldn't be more of a help than a hindrance. At the same time, the experience of playing a game along side a robot even for an experiment would be an interesting thing to do, and to be able to see how it's like, so even a basic form of robot might be worth it.

Having an advanced robot designed for playing games would be very interesting as well, but that's dependent on perspective, while it's possible to see an advanced robot as simply a friend that's designed for playing games with and being able to talk to while playing games with, it could also be something to do other things with, depending on how “advanced” the robot is of course, in my situation, one that learns, remembers, and develops a personality would be far beyond a video game playing robot, and playing video games is probably not going to be it's task that it was designed for.

In short, if robotics develops far along enough, we might possibly be able to have a robot that we can play video games with. That alone would open up many possibilities for people for various reasons, from simply wanting someone around to play a multiplayer game with (and being able to act on it), to having someone to regularly play and talk about games with, robots and games could add a lot of things for a lot of people.