Question: are robots living

Clare Burrage answered on 14 Mar 2012:

That’s a hard question to answer, because it depends what you mean by living. We can make robots that can do most physical things that humans can do now, and we are close to making computers that can have conversations just like humans.
There’s a competition called the Turing Test where people have chat conversations on a computer, some people are talking to real people and some people are talking to a computer program but they don’t know which is which. The aim of the competition is to make a computer program that everyone thinks is a person. If we can do that then you could say that we’ve invented a computer that can think for itself, and I think that’s pretty close to a computer being alive. Computers are now close to passing the Turing Test!
Lots of these ideas about whether robots and computers are alive are thought about more in the stories by Isaac Asimov. If you’re interested and you haven’t read them already you should have a look. They’re great books to read.