Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

movement of the hand is reproduced by a robot in another room.
    The Japanese have also excelled at producing robots that can interact socially with humans. In Nagoya, there is the robot chef that can create a standard fast-food dinner in a few minutes. You simply punch in what you want from a menu and the robot chef produces your meal in front of you. Built by Aisei, an industrial robotics company, this robot can cook noodles in 1 minute and 40 seconds and can serve 80 bowls on a busy day. The robot chef looks very much like ones on the automobile assembly lines in Detroit. You have two large mechanical arms, which are precisely programmed to move in a certain sequence. Instead of screwing and welding metal in a factory, however, these robotic fingers grab ingredients froma series of bowls containing dressing, meat, flour, sauces, spices, etc. The robotic arms mix and then assemble them into a sandwich, salad, or soup. The Aisei cook looks like a robot, resembling two gigantic hands emerging from the kitchen counter. But other models being planned start to look more human.
    Also in Japan, Toyota has created a robot that can play the violin almost as well as any professional. It resembles ASIMO, except that it can grab a violin, sway with the music, and then delicately play complex violin pieces. The sound is amazingly realistic and the robot can make grand gestures like a master musician. Although the music is not yet at the level of a concert violinist, it is good enough to entertain audiences. Of course, in the last century, we have had mechanical piano machines that played tunes inscribed on a large rotating disk. Like these piano machines, the Toyota machine is also programmed. But the difference is that the Toyota machine is deliberately designed to mimic all the positions and postures of a human violinist in the most realistic way.
    Also, at Waseda University in Japan, scientists have made a robotic flutist. The robot contains hollow chambers in its chest, like lungs, which blow air over a real flute. It can play quite complex melodies like “The Flight of the Bumblebee.” These robots cannot create new music, we should emphasize, but they can rival a human in their ability to perform music.
    The robot chef and robot musician are carefully programmed. They are not autonomous. Although these robots are quite sophisticated compared to the old player pianos, they still operate on the same principles. True robot maids and butlers are still in the distant future. But the descendants of the robot chef and the robot violinist and flutist may one day find themselves embedded in our lives, performing basic functions that were once thought to be exclusively human.
    EMOTIONAL ROBOTS
    By midcentury, the era of emotional robots may be in full flower.
    In the past, writers have fantasized about robots that yearn to become human and have emotions. In
Pinocchio,
a wooden puppet wished to become a real boy. In the
Wizard of Oz,
the Tin Man wished for a heart. And in
Star Trek: The Next Generation,
Data the android tried to masteremotions by telling jokes and figuring out what makes us laugh. In fact, in science fiction, it is a recurring theme that although robots may become increasingly intelligent, the essence of emotions will always elude them. Robots may one day become smarter than us, some science fiction writers declare, but they won’t be able to cry.
    Actually, that may not be true. Scientists are now understanding the true nature of emotions. First, emotions tell us what is good for us and what is harmful. The vast majority of things in the world are either harmful or not very useful. When we experience the emotion of “like,” we are learning to identify the tiny fraction of things in the environment that are beneficial to us.
    In fact, each of our emotions (hate, jealousy, fear, love, etc.) evolved over millions of years to protect us from the dangers of a hostile world and help us to reproduce. Every emotion helps to propagate our genes into the next generation.
    The critical role of emotions in our evolution was apparent to neurologist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California, who analyzed victims of brain injuries or disease. In some of these patients, the link between the thinking part of their brains (the cerebral cortex) and the emotional center (located deep in the center of the brain, like the amygdala) was cut. These people were perfectly normal, except they had difficulty expressing