Real facts and short fiction. Comments and Ratings. Bullets and Serials. Mixture of Science, Futurism and Personal Projections. A little of everything...
One afternoon of the many in which the programs we developed took hours and even days to produce results, several colleagues were meeting near our computer and the topic of robots came up.
Some of us talked about the distance between the human being and the automation of processes by computers, which by the way is currently maintained, others about the development of Neuroscience itself, others the development of mathematics and computing itself, in short, almost any topic fit into the conversation.
We envision a future, each in its own way, where computing, now called "informatics", would penetrate the entire field of human endeavor, even supplying its own complex activities such as driving cars, controlling manufacturing processes, and others, many of that it is well known that to a greater or lesser degree after 50+ years have already been achieved and are being achieved.
And then we fell into the classic theme of robots, that if they could be humanoid, that if mechanical, that if they could carry out tasks and then relegate humans from many work activities, but above all we talked about the internal "mechanisms" they would have, the so-called "artificial intelligence", where I always emphasized "artificial" and never "human intelligence" which by the way is maintained to this day, since nothing developed even through mathematical theories resembles it does not even resemble a "real neuron" much less the way it communicates across the synapse.
By the way, I have seen many mathematical physicist dissertations where they start with something like "here we have a neuron", and "here we see the neural links" and I only see lines and circles on the screen. Wow, apparently no one of them really knows the real "biological neurons" are working throughout the brain and body network. They don't even come close.
At the end, after hours of talking, a mathematician named Luis tells us with great aplomb: "There you who have not done it yet because I already did mine and I can tell you how to do them too" referring to robots, the subject of conversation.
We were perplexed and incredulous, we looked at each other thinking "Luis has gone crazy", and then he snapped at us: "Have children like me, I already have two."
Believe that our laughter reached the moon!
And so we were talking about robots in 1977 ...
Octavio Báez Hidalgo.