Vision - The Movie

When it sees, will we?

Science and Vision

Unmanned Predator The prospect of "fighting robots" is already a reality. The U.S. Navy has announced that it intends to replace its entire fleet of manned fighter craft with unmanned autonomous or semi-autonomous robotic fighters by the year 2035. The U.S. Army has an unmanned vehicle, PROWLER, in limited use in the field.

The military already uses unmanned drones, "smart" bombs, and A.I. pattern-recognition software.

Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing, NASA, Johns Hopkins University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the U.S. Joint Forces Command, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) all have autonomous robot projects. M.I.T.'s Humanoid Robotics Group seeks to understand human consciousness and behavior by "reverse-engineering" it in robots.

The goals of these projects vary widely, from creating fully "intelligent" autonomous agents, to building simple remote vehicles. Some of the robots are explicitly for the military, while others may have civilian uses (space exploration). What all of these programs have in common is the goal of understanding human mental capabilities and "porting" them over to the machine world.

Vision is a quintessentially human quality, and a key component of these ventures. It's been possible for some time to put a video camera on a robot and keep it from bumping into things. However, this does not make a robot "intelligent." What makes human vision so different is how we assign meaning to what we perceive. We don't just see a collection of shapes — we link them up into higher-order objects, analyze them, and figure out what they mean to us. Many scientists believe that this "part-wise" analysis is also a key component of toolmaking, language, music, and other uniquely human activities.

To reverse-engineer this ability into a robot requires a real understanding of how this "part-wise" analysis works in us, and how it interacts with the rest of our brain and body. Thus, while working on making a "seeing" robot, Lydia actually creates a more human one. This robot, in turn, shows her what's missing in her own life.

P.W. Singer's Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century details the coming revolution in military robotics technology and its applications.

Steve Featherstone's The Coming Robot Army (Harper's Magazine, 2007) chronicles the current state of autonomous robotics research.

General Dynamics developed a variety of unmanned semi-autonomous vehicles for the Department of Defense.

How We See Things that Move: Integrating Information About Movement, a report of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, takes up the subject of how the motion-detection component of human vision may work.

M.I.T.'s Humanoid Robotics Group produces a number of robots, in an attempt to reverse-engineer and better understand human behavior and cognition.

U.S. Joint Forces Command actively studies and develops plans to deploy autonomous robots in the field.