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Edouard Corbin

Design me a robot

Take a few moments and try to imagine life without electricity. There would be no more television or radio, no more electric lighting or household appliances. For many there would be no more transport, central heating, cooking or income.

In a few short years, it will be as difficult to imagine living without intelligent machines as it is to imagine life without electricity. This is no longer a dream far off in the future, but rather a reality on a not so distant horizon. Science has truly gone beyond fiction! A computer has already defeated our greatest chess champion.

Companion robots already help the elderly and people on their own with their everyday tasks. Space exploration is carried out by robots able to adapt to unpredictable environments. Thanks to the speedy progress of the cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence, we can develop systems (software and hardware) able to reproduce the highest skills of human cognition and abstract reasoning language. We are developing all this to achieve the final objective: awareness.

This technological development is not a harebrained idea from researchers working away in their secluded laboratories. It has become inevitable in the evolution of our societies, which will henceforth be information-based. In life’s simple every day moments, as in complex scientific research programmes, we are bombarded with an avalanche of data. Thus, both supply and demand for information are ever-increasing, but there is a lack of inter-mediation, and more and more often we lack systems capable of memorising them, sorting them, joining them together, interpreting them and sharing them. To sum up, we are talking about “machines that think”, where yesterday it was, “machines that calculate”.

In order to see the sector’s future, we only need to look at what our neighbours are doing. In the United States and Japan, governments, universities and companies are investing heavily in research and development of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences. Europe continues to lag behind. Yet, there is no lack of talent on our continent. On the contrary, our researchers are on the brink of numerous theoretical advances dealing with cellular robots, autocatalytic and neuro-mimetic networks, genetic algorithms, multi-agent adaptive systems, etc. However, such brilliant pieces of work are all too often highly fragmented.

Most importantly, they are not given sufficient political backing and economic support for the issue involved. Ideas exist but projects are made to wait. Resources are lacking but the courage and stamina that allows man to walk on the moon or decipher the genetic code are also missing. This general interest approach can only be public even if the aim is to involve private companies in its projects and consequences.

A simple way of allowing us to pool our efforts is to launch a European Union key action project called “intelligent machines” within the guideline programme (2003-2008). With a transparent budget and a guideline committee bringing together researchers, politicians and other members of society. There will be a two-fold goal: scientific and educational. For the associated researchers, it will deal with the development of an artificial intelligence system capable of achieving interactivity that comes as close as possible to human awareness. For society, it will mean discovering advances in research and joining Europeans together in an original, participatory and recreational way, including: travelling exhibitions, robotics and information technology championships for amateurs, imagination competitions for children, general states of information cognition aiming at eradicating all the most pressing social needs.

Launching the “machines that think” project will result in the following:

- Major economic, technological, and social advances will take place
- Europe will be placed in a strategic position in a field essential for collective security
- Europe will be able to deal with our most important international partners on an equal basis
- Imagination will be stimulated and our young people will be more highly motivated to follow their calling
- We will work towards reinforcing co-operation and good relations between European countries.

The reason for the European Union’s existence is to guarantee prosperity, peace, security and sovereignty for its citizens. In our opinion, from now on it must turn “talk” into “action” and “promises” into “initiatives”. We also ask the Union to commit to the future by launching the 2003 programme, “Machines that think”.

Note: this request will be addressed to the leading French and European politicians as well as to the general media. English, German and Spanish translations are welcome!
 

The first signatories :

Jean-Paul BAQUIAST
Rédacteurs en chef de automatesintelligents.com - France.

Stéphane BARBIER
Professeur-Agrégé de philosophie - France.

Alain CARDON
Directeur du laboratoire informatique de l'Université du Havre et membre du LIP6 (Paris VI - Auteur de "Conscience artificielle et systèmes adaptatifs" ed. Eyrolles, Paris 1999.- France.

Sébastien CAQUARD
Doctorant en géographie - Université J. Monnet - Saint Etienne - France.

Edouard CORBIN
Délégué général de la Société internationale d'évolutique - France.

Dan CRISTEA
Maitre de Conférences, Ph.D., doyen de la Faculté d'Informatique, Université "Al.I.Cuza" Iasi, Roumanie

André DUPUIS
Responsable Informatique - IUFM Bourgogne - France

Patrick ESQUIROL
Maître de conférences à l'INSA de Toulouse (enseignant en Algorithmique&Programmation, Intelligence Artificielle, Programmation logique) et Chercheur au LAAS-CNRS de Toulouse - France.

Christophe JACQUEMIN
Rédacteur en chef de Automatesintelligents.com - France.

Frédéric MALAVAL
Professeur-associé au Département des Sciences de la terre et de l'Environnement de l'Université de Cergy-Pontoise - France.

Youssef MACHROUH
Doctorant au LIMSI-CNRS - spécialité : vision par machine et intelligence artificielle - France.

Charles MÜLLER
Journaliste scientifique - Dossier BioSciences - France.

Benoit MORISSET
Ingénieur doctorant au laboratoire d'analyse et d'architecture des systèmes du CNRS (LAAS-CNRS TOULOUSE) au sein du groupe Robotique et Intelligence Artificielle (RIA) - France.

Camille ROUX
Maître de conférences - Biologie moléculaire vegétale,
Laboratoire BMAS - Université Paris12/ Val de Marne -Créteil - France.

Guy THERAULAZ
Chargé de Recherches CNRS, Laboratoire d'Ethologie et Cognition Animale
Universite Paul Sabatier de Toulouse - France.

Others signatories : http://www.chez.com/evolutic/signataires.htm

© Automates Intelligents 2001