Shoutbox

(Just a little off-topic, side not, I haven't been on much bcz I am house sitting for ppl with no internet )

Well I saw I,ROBOT on friday, and I thought it was generally a good movie (I will buy it, along with Spiderman 2 and Van Helsing when they come out on DVD ) but it got me to wondering 2 questions:

• First off, what did you think of the movie/the movie's effects (it was shot in Vancouver Canada I am only like 4 hours away )
  
  
• Second, and this one is more technical - do you think it is possible to have robots with fealings, dreams, and a form of consiousness within 20-30 years and be affordable enough for a middle class person can afford one? I don't just mean a stupid machine that responds to your requests via pre-programmed questions, I mean robots that can decide things on their own, and live among us, perhaps eventually esculating to something like what happened on the matrix (I don't mean the virtual world, I just mean machines eventually taking over after being oppressed for so long.

Just a little bit of information to help you with your answer(s):

• The HONDA ACIMO robot can walk, move, and decifer its enviroment, and has the general shape of a human
  You can already purchase one for ~1.5 million USD
  The info page is at: http://world.honda.com/ASIMO/
  Current model, ASIMO V2:
  
  
  And here's the old model, P3 (Prototype 3): 
  
• There is an experimental robot that currently can respond to your tone of voice with facial expressions and indeciferable gibberish (which will hopefully eventually be words)
  
• An experimental robot, currently in progress, can respond to what you say using complex algorithims. It currently can respond to about 1/4 of what you say with an individual answer (not just a simple yes/no)

(Upon googling I found this artical about conscious robot:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/dennett.rob.html )