Artificial inteligence

Yes, we have all seen that film, and it's beautiful. The robotic kid is programmed to give inconditional love and is then replaced by the human kid, in an act of pure cruelty. He becomes something like society's trash, along with other robots, and "dies" for the dream of becoming human, so that his mom would finally love him. It's truly beautiful.

However, I don't think a machine will ever be able to feel. Robots can be clever, can even learn and understand, but all of those processes depend only on logic. Feelings aren't logical and, even though you can make steel think, I can't see how you make it feel - but, hey, who knows, maybe in the future...

So, why am I posting about this? What could possibly make me post about artificial intelligence two days before my Portuguese exam? A documentary I just saw on TV. They were creating a robot called Watson and programing it to beat humans in Jeopardy (an horrible game we played in the English lessons and in which you are given an answer and have to create the question for it). They found a problem - the robot sometimes didn't fully understand what type of question it was supposed to ask (it asked for holidays instead of months, for instance) - so the programmers made it cross information based on the correct questions the other players had previously asked, so that it could understand the correct type of question. Once again, all logic, no feelings.

One thing I noticed - humans hate clever machines. And I'm not sure if we shouldn't, because we are very likely to loose control of something bigger than us, even when we are it's creators. That machine-controlled world scenario isn't that improbable, in fact. Computers really are much clever than humans, and if you program them to think by themselves... well, I'm not sure it will be completely good. It may be interesting, but not for humans.