Artificial Intelligence is a very recent invention…or is it? Humans have been fascinated by intelligent machines for thousands of years and the Isaac Asimov's Robot Series is a series of thirty-seven science fiction short stories and six novels created from 1940 to 1995, all of them being intelligend and artificial. Some of these intelligent machines exist only in our collective imagination, in art and literature., while others have seen the light of day as mechanical marvels, although a few were later exposed as elaborate frauds.
The robots of today might not be what our ancestors imagined, and they may not be even whet the science fiction writers imagined until now. This lecture argues that the relationship between humans and machines has always been complex, and that we still can’t decide whether we really want them to be like us.
