Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.
Character robotics could plant the seed for robots that actually have empathy. So, if they achieve human level intelligence or, quite possibly, greater than human levels of intelligence, this could be the seeds of hope for our future.
That machines will surpass us in intelligence is inevitable. What it means is unknowable. Will they be sentient? What will they care about in the sense that determines our human motivations? All the theorizing by the experts and non-experts makes for interesting conversations and dramatic headlines, but it's more likely we will be surprised by how our technology develops and how it is used, as we so often are.
If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love so what difference would it make?
Machines certainly can solve problems, store information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure.
Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own.
There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over.
My point of view actually on artificial intelligence, which ties into the nature for humans constantly looking into the reasons for why we exist and why consciousness exists changed during the making of Chappie. And I'm not actually completely sure that humans are going to be capable of giving birth to A.I. in the way that films fictionalize it.
It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.
