Journal 9

This week we listened to the various poster presentations and it was very interesting to see what other people decided to talk about for their poster presentations and how everyone found a fun way to incorporate everything we have learned in class through out the semester. My group decided to focus on the comparison between humans and robots and the many different characteristics that throughout evolutionary periods has allowed us to identify as humans. We start with the physical aspects of what makes us humans such as the evolutionary traits of bipedalism, ability to communicate, use of tools for hunting, and cognitive capacity. We also talked about the emotional characteristics and how that differentiates us from robots because robots cannot understand the causation of emotions. We then focused in the societal views on robotics and the perception that society has on considering robots humanoids or not if they will ultimately one day be able to completely imitate our movements and way of reasoning. Lastly, we focused our research on the philosophical aspects relating to the comparison of humans and robots. I think this will be a very insightful topic to present on because technological advancements are already developing robots with cognitive capacities that allows them to imitate human behaviors as well as become more autonomous so it will be really interesting to see where people stand on this topic.