It seems that the artificial intelligence related in science fiction is not as far from reality as we used to think. The main character of the film AI, a little boy belonging to a robot series capable of emulating human behavior, is now a model to reach in current scientific projects, which aim at providing machines with consciousness, thoughts, and emotions to interact with human beings. Thus, the world described in Blade Runner, a world where humans and robots coexist and cannot be distinguished with the naked eye, may be just behind the corner.

The advances in AI field, however, start to raise some serious concerns about robot autonomy and its social status as well as how to face this social disruption, and the three Laws elaborated by Asimov to protect humans from machines start to make sense for other than computer geeks. Scientifics are concerned about the “loss of human control of computer-based intelligences”, and the past February, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence organized a conference in Asilomar (not a casual place) to discuss the limits of the research in this field. Development of machines that are close to kill autonomously are worth a discussion by those involved in the creation of the brain of such devices. The news of this event has leaked in the Markoff’s article in the New York Times.

On the other hand, who will be responsible for damages caused by these autonomous friends? Themselves or the corresponding designer? In this sense, philosophy should play a leading role in the design and integration of these “future citizens” since they should have a moral system allowing them to learn ethics from experience and people, and also find their place in our society. The latter implies to create a legal framework that defines machine’s civic rights and duties which is a proposal under study (see the news published by “El Periódico”, in Spanish language).

Finally, one may ask whether or not we are ready to live with human emulators. In my view, we are not. Although in the past years we have been skillful to adapt to new and challenging situations, and our experience with immigration integration and race conflicts should help us to welcome these new electronic neighbors, I tend to think that coexistence with robots will be one of the greatest challenges mankind has ever faced. Anyway, we will need to figure out the way to overcome it because the individualism and loneliness ruling our current society is leading us unrelentingly to a future with custom-made roommates.