Do Machines Have Minds?

Are we living in the age of robots? Are more and more jobs going to be taken over by robotic machines that talk, display data, work, and even think? Those questions lead us to the next question that has been thrown around for years: are machines and robots capable of having a mind like humans? In the ever-increasing world of technology, this question needs to be considered and the real possibility that robots could take on a life of their own needs to be considered.

There have been many examples of successful robots throughout recent times. The robots of C-3PO and R2-D2 were created in the advent of Star Wars. They were beloved by everyone who watched Star Wars and were adored. Other robots include Data on Star Trek, Rosie on The Jetsons, as well as other movies and shows that have depicted robots in their own lives.

One such movie, however, that has followed the life of a robot, which was created by Hollywood, is I, Robot. This movie depicted a robot named Sonny and his quest to find out exactly what he is. He discovered that his creator gave him the ability to disobey orders and to make choices, something which normal robots cannot do. Why can't they do this? We humans usually think of robots and machines as things that are programmed to do something for us. Robots do not have real brains, like our human brains, therefore, we humans assume that they cannot think in the normal way that humans do.

Along with the capability to think would give robots the ability to have free will. The human race is considered to have some sort of free will, which robots do not have. As stated before, robots are programmed by humans to perform specific tasks. If they are programmed then there is no way that they could have free will, right?

What is the one difference between robots and humans that humans have and robots do not have? Of course there are many differences that can be seen between robots and humans, but one specific difference is the fact that humans have the ability to display emotions and feelings, while robots do not. As with the characters of C-3PO and Data, they were programmed to be more of a statistical nature, spewing out difficult calculations and probabilities at the drop of the hat. Even in the movie I, Robot, we see this is true. In the first scene, we are taken to a situation where a robot had the choice to save a small, innocent little girl or a grown man. Even though the robot calculated that the grown man had more of a chance to survive than the little girl, the robot ended up saving the grown man simply because he had more of a statistical rate of surviving. Of course any human in that situation would probably want to go after the little girl before saving the grown man.

But is the only thing that differentiates humans from robots is the fact that we have a mind, which comes from our brain, which gives us the ability to reason, think, have self-control as well as free will, and the ability to display the many emotions that we have? What if there was a way to give robots a brain which could give them the ability to do all of the things that humans do? However, even if they had a brain, would they be able to speak? Even dogs and cats have brains and humans, a lot of time, perceive those two domesticated animals' needs and wants to be just as important as humans are. Dogs and cats do have emotions and feelings, too. What about the whining sound that your puppy or dog makes when you put him or her outside when he doesn't want to? Cats certainly can get angry, too, and use their defense mechanisms to hiss or scratch when they're upset or angry. Dogs and cats even have the ability to empathize with us humans, comforting us in our sorrows.

So just giving a robot a brain would not be the only thing that the robot would need in order to act just like a human. But what else would it need? It is very possible to give a robot that extra little push that would send it over the edge and cross the line from just completing programmed orders to making decisions on their own. The world definitely needs to look out, because we are living in the age of robots!