by Carol Noble

Created on: March 12, 2007   Last Updated: May 02, 2007

There are humans who are mentally disabled but have the ability to think in one or two ways which match the speed and ability of the computer. They are called savants. But whilst they can carry out some specific tasks brilliantly they do so at the expense of other general everyday tasks, doing them poorly, and requiring a lot of human support. So it is with the computer and artificial intelligence today.

In science fiction stories of the past, people have been afraid of the development of the android because it is so like a human but of a material that doesn't get damaged as easily, and thinks a lot faster than the human mind. The general outcomes of these stories is to consider the robot superior to the human so destroy it.

Humans need to survive, like any other animal on this Earth. We are part of the biological ecology of this planet, and as such need to remain within it.

Robotic machines may be more appropriate for sending into space, but they have only a limited use here on Earth - very limited.

Science has been trying to create a homonoid robot for decades, and they are slowly developing certain areas of human activity. The Japanese have developed human robots which can do quite a lot of movements and speech, but they still need humans to guide them.

In the meanwhile, humans are being "dumbed down" in what they can do, possibly to allow people to think the computer is a wonderful machine which is almost human. For years we were told that the computer could think faster than a human and accomplish many tasks better than a human. In other words, human beings were being overtaken, and considered obsolete. The rise in the use of computers in the workplace has added to this making it seem as if the computer is a faster thinker and worker than humans.

But the truth is stranger than that. Yes, a computer can calculate quickly, often far quicker than a human, but the standard of a human's mental calculation ability has been reduced by the use of calculating technology. When I left school in 1965 I was of a reasonable standard at mental arithmetic. I then used a comptometer in the workplace for two years (a comptometer is a calculating machine, the forerunner of the modern calculator) and found I had lost the ability to mentally calculate having started to rely on the machine to do it for me. To overcome this I had to relearn all over again how to do the simplest of mental arithmetic - it was as if I had never been to school!

I later saw how computers altered the whole

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