Man v/s Machines

Compassion, fear, hope, anger, frustration, loneliness, sorrow, happiness,surprise, envy, misery, gratitude...
These are some amongst the multitude of emotions that an individual experiences in one's lifetime. We can "feel" these wide ranging emotions, but machines? Not yet...

All these can be clearly observed in human beings or the Homo sapiens...other species can do so too but to a certain extent. These emotions can be considered as the various psychological states of an individual's mind. They originate in the limbic system of the human brain which comprises the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus.

I wouldn't go into the anatomy part of it for I am not a neurosurgeon!!! But, these complex emotions change the very fact that machines which despite tremendous technological advances aren't able to experience these making our species a class apart from them(May be in the future, machines may out do man). It's fascinating to watch science fiction movies like Terminator, Star trek, I,Robot or read books like 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke. Researchers have been working on such possibilities since ages and this has led to a field of Strong Artificial Intelligence which aims to develop machines which can mimic man in all aspects and probably exceed human capabilities. Advances in the field of AI has led to applications such as neural networks, data mining and computer pattern recognition.

 For instance, IBM's Watson defeated humans on the quiz show Jeopardy in the human versus machine match. It's astonishing to hear about these breakthroughs. What people fail to realise is that it was man who came up with the complex algorithms and software in such computer systems. I salute thee, O Creator. This ultimately brings us to the conclusion that unless scientists come up with software which can learn all by itself, it's the human brain which is responsible for all the scientific establishments.

NASA's robot

This makes me wonder about the tremendous hidden potential this 1.5 kilogram mass of cells can do if challenged! More to look out for in the future!!!