Imagination in Artificial Intelligence

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about making robots that can behave like humans and movies like iRobot show Robots taking over the world

I believe that there is only one thing that will allow this to happen, imagination. Imagination is what makes humans who they are. Out of all the animals, we probably have the most active imagination but that is not to say that other animals don't have imagination.

The reason why I believe that imagination is so vital is because of the flexibility it provides us. For example, when we look at a car, we can generally "imagine" the car and how it will look from various angles. However, if you provide the same image to a computer, it won't be able to recognize the same car shown from other sides.

This proves to be a hassle when we search for images on Google. Instead of recognizing the image, it looks for key words in the same web page. Sometimes, when you search for 'car' it gives you an apple. Any human will be able to tell that thats not a car but a computer can't. It has to be fed the image of every single car from every angle to be able to recognize them itself. If they were given imagination somehow, they would see one car and then be able to identify other objects as cars.

Of course there are softwares that can identify basic shapes and colors, but those are pre-programmed into the computer. If instead, we can provide imagination, it woud make computing a lot more efficient.

Nevertheless, there is a risk that imagination will cause robots taking over the world as they will be able to develop their own ideas with it. I am getting ahead of myself though. No one ahs been able to figure out exactly how imagination works and it will be decades before we will be able to unlock its secrets and be able to produce this technology