"It was an astounding request. A year ago, neuroscientist Mitsuo Kawato called on the Japanese government to commit 50 billion yen ($446 million) a year for the next three decades. The dream: an Apollo-like program to build a robot with the mental, physical, and emotional capabilities of a 5-year-old child. Kawato called his plan the Atom Project, named for the popular postwar cartoon Tetsuwan Atom (known as Astroboy in the US), the story of a superhero boy robot.
Today the Atom Project remains little more than an audacious proposal. But the science behind it is quite real. With each advance in computing speed, battery capacity, camera and motor miniaturization, and software capability, the world grows closer to the ultimate goal of robotics: a walking, talking, feeling android worthy of our cinematic inspirations.
Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances. And while there are a number of extremely complex problems to solve before we can make something as advanced as Sonny, the star of I, Robot, we're getting there, one piece at a time. To find out where the state of the art lies, Wired surveyed the projects that might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us."
Link
Source: Wired
See also:
Rise of the Machines - Wired
I, Robocop - Wired
Robotic Nation
Robotic Nation News
The Age of Spiritual Machines
KurzweilAI.net
Machine Watch
Robots.net
Generation 5
Robotics news - Moreover
Robot - Wikipedia
How Robots Work - HowStuffWorks
AI in the news
I, Robot
The ethical questions of robotics - Kuro5hin
Supernova: Autonomic computing - Red Herring
Isaac Asimov - Wikipedia
Stanislaw Lem - Wikipedia
The Artilect War
Hans Moravec
Marvin Minsky
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Robots and AI - Wired
AI and A-Life - New Scientist
Artificial Intelligence - BBC
Lexicon of the Future
Bill Joy - Wikipedia
AI Forums
DARPA Grand Challenge 2004 - IT Conversations
What 2034 will bring
21st century - Wikipedia
The Bicentennial Man - Slashdot
Science Fiction - AI in the news
The Animatrix
Terminator 3
Kubrick 2001: The space odyssey explained
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