Our artifacts are getting smarter, and a loose parallel with the evolution of animal intelligence
suggesLs one future course for them. Computerless industrial machinery exhibits the behavioral
flexibility of single-celled organisms. Today's best computer-controlled robots are like the simpler
invertebrates. A thousand-fold increase in computer power in the next decade should make
possible machines with reptile-like sensory and motor competence. Properly configured, such
robots could do in the physical world what personal computers now do in the world of data--act
on our behalf as literal-minded slaves. Growing computer power over the next half-century will
allow this reptile stage will be surpassed, in stages producing robots that learn like mammals,
model their world like primates and eventually reason like humans. Depending on your point of
view, humanity will then have produced a worthy successor, or transcended some of its inherited
limitations and so transformed itself into something quite new.
