Advancing Robotics - Evolution

At some point and time, everyone is guilty of trying to start off a little further along than they should. It might be in learning a new skill, undertaking a new task or even developing a relationship, but we all have the propensity to skip ahead to "the good stuff." Sometimes it works out, as a matter of fact, sometimes is works only because we skipped ahead; but often it will bite us in the ass instead.

The real world is full of examples that show how skipping ahead has proven not only beneficial, but brought about results no one thought possible. Mostly, this has to do with people not knowing something could not be done. Science was always good for this, with theory stating something could not be accomplished, only to have someone who never learned that theory prove it wrong. Far more often, though, skipping ahead has the tendency to produce failure.

Cognitive roboticists and AI developers have been guilty of jumping ahead more than most other "rational" scientific groups. And we do it at the professional, academic, and hobby levels; only, unlike many other disciplines, failure is not recognized. Instead it is seen as a step forward. Well, yes, Yoda and Sesame Street have taught us all that failure does not really exist as long as we learn from it. Unfortunately, when you set out to accomplish a task, and you do not meet the results desired at the end of the task, it is a failure. It is not necessarily a bad thing, some failures produce something totally unexpected and, yet, miraculous. But it is still failure.

In the world of Artificially Intelligent Robots, we have been failing miserably since before the first transistor was invented. And this failure is entirely because we all have decided to skip ahead. Jumping straight into writing creative algorithms in an attempt to unlock the secrets of artificial life. Ok, not all of us, but in the research I have read coming from those who started at the beginning, they have decided to stay at the beginning. Or at least have failed to progress.

The problem is that this is still a very new science; and as with all sciences we build on the foundations laid before us. It is only that cognitive robotics and artificial intelligence have no real foundations. Just teetering stilts that a few people have thrown out to the masses such as Turing Tests or Neural Networks or whatever the latest AI buzzwords are. I've read the algorithms. I've studied the theories. I've followed the research. I'm calling it all a failure. Sounds a little harsh, but it is an honest assessment. There are no artificially intelligent machines out there. There are some that mimic intelligence. There are some that even learn to a degree, or appear to learn at least. But as for a cognitive machine... None.

And now comes the part where I tell you why. Cognitive robotics and artificial intelligence has a foundation, and it starts at the beginning. Evolutionary science. We have skipped ahead past single cell organisms and plant life to walking, talking, seeing machines; but we haven't grasped the basics yet. We need to start over, only this time, we need to start at the "real" beginning and evolve from there. Of course we don't have 14 billion years to evolve the field of robotics, so there are some steps that will be skipped, such as the slow hereditary mutation process, and instead we steal from religion and go with Intelligent Creation.

I have been extremely guilty of skipping ahead in my work within the field. As an example, I wrote my first AI program in 1992. It was a learning algorithm, and it did learn. A little too well in some areas, but not well enough in others. It overwrote the computer operating system eventually and died. It was a failure, and I have been failing right alongside everyone else working in the field, professional or hobbyist ever since; because I have been jumping right into the cognitive part.

Now I am going to take a step back. Well, 14 billion years worth of steps back. Or 6000 years if you are a "devout believer". This will be the path from the very beginnings, up to the point I meet the robotics goal set out as part of the You Design It project, a hovering robot that learns to fly all on its own. This is my task now, and I am starting at the beginning this time around.