Okay let me put it straight before you infer it wrong (thanks to the LIMITED cognitive capabilities that humans possess), this post has "Humans can't make robots smarter than them" written all over it. That in no way is an obstinately preposterous statement claiming humans to be the unchallenged smartest thing on earth, on the contrary, it indirectly intends to state the otherwise.


Now, back to the topic...


A.I. It's everywhere. It's in our tv, refrigerator, car, doors, dishwasher, computer, wallet, chair, and what-not bizarre things around us. It's even in the spell check software that's currently helping me weed off the errors in this post ! The way it has creeped into every nook and corner of our world, and claimed to continue to do so in near future, it is touted to be the next best thing created by humans after, maybe, the invention of Wheel. Humans are working too hard at stuffing a lot of it into self-thinking (or rather self-artificially-thinking) things like Robots. Yes, Frankenstein could come alive. They say they'd make robots that'd clean your homes, cook you food, drive you places and blah blah blah..in short, you could relegate them to all the menial chores you wish be done by them and they won't be querulously whining over pay-raise, or medical break. Okay, till here, sounds acceptable. But, the human optimism goes out of bounds when they say they'd go one step further by making robots that Are Smarter Than Humans !


Before I lay forward my doubts on that, here're some facts.


Humans have been around since last 15 thousand years (okay maybe lesser, if you mean the time since when nature began spewing brad-pitts and other tail-less siblings of him). Since then, they have been meddling with things, studying them, using them, and often changing them for their ease. That way, they have not only developed skills at dealing with the world around them, they have also shaped themselves accordingly to perform better. Yes, playing too much video games make your reflexes faster and thumbs nimbler.


A human starts analysing sights, sounds, smells and feelings of the world around it right since its birth and keeps learning and storing all of the necessary data in its brain till the age of around 9yrs. After that, it is all just a game of coming across something, comparing or filling the missing information about it from the "store-house" memory and acting accordingly.


If all of that experience, skills and knowledge could be converted to Robot-understandable data and fed, downloaded or rammed into its brain, the humans believe they'd bring back another Einstein !


Now, what most of the people are overlooking here is the fact that humans become smarter or dumber by their sheer will and propensity towards certain around them. Geniuses are raised, not born. A smart robot, as soon as it becomes self-aware and smart enough to make decisions, may also decide to, say, start playing video games all day and fill all its memory with data pertaining to just That Particular Domain and eventually do away with the data about other things around him and turn Dumber !. Yes, video games make you dumber as well.


So, you cannot expect a fully self-thinking robot to choose solving complex maths problems, or even do the menial chores that its lesser thinking siblings were doing under your subjugation. Yes again, frankenstein may come alive. And if the Robot makers think that they'd re-wire the robot to do just what they expect it to do, then they're not making it completely Self-thinking ! That's rude ! They're just creating another generation of servile machines capable of doing things more like the way they want be done.


Just like Einstein's children didn't turn out to be Einsteins, Gandhi's weren't another peace-cladding freedom fighters, and Abhishek Bacchan can't act due to their sheer choice, the same may also apply to the Robots in future. We may have to convince them into doing what we feel is right for them. In short, good counselling (read, parenting) would be necessary. No, you cannot blame your parents for your stupid behaviour.


What and how the robots would behave in the near future is yet for all of us to see, but, I feel, not many would stay too smart all through their lives (if they have a definite life-span)