The event took place at the “Smena” modern culture center as a special part of the “Prosvetitel" award festival.

The “Kurilka Gutenberga” noncommercial educational project, developed in cooperation with the “Obrazvach” group, has become the most attended lecture project in Russia for less than a year. According to the event hosts, they invite scholars and experts in different scientific areas to keep the audience updated on the latest scientific novelties in a vibrant manner of a live conversation.
What is implied in the scientific concept of the artificial intelligence? Is it possible to create a robot able to imitate human emotions? Are we on the edge of a breakout of intelligent machines? Despite the late hours, over a hundred of people looking for answers to these and other questions came at the discussion “Artificial Intelligence: When and How will Robots Replace us?”.
During the meeting, Evgeni Magid, Head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Robotic Systems (LIRS) of Innopolis University and Maksim Talanov, Head of the Laboratory of Machine Cognition (Institute for Information Technology and Information Systems) of Kazan Federal University outlined current state of research in the field of the artificial intelligence and shared their opinions on the possible future of this scientific area for the decades to come.
“Issues related to the application of intelligent robots and a perspective of humans to be outpaced by robots stirred the most excitement of the audience”, - shared his impression of the discussion its moderator, Ilya Afanasyev, Associate Professor of the Laboratory of Intelligent Robotic Systems of Innopolis University. Later the researcher told about intense debates resulting from the presentation by Evgeni Magid: “Searching for Intelligence. Robotics: Past, Present and Future”. The audience showed a special interest in security aspects of the artificial intelligence with regard to the humanity and the issue of social responsibility of the developers for the consequences resulting from the introduction of such systems.
At the end of his speech Prof. Evgeni Magid announced forecasts made by Ray Kurzweil, a well-known futurologist and Director of Engineering at Google who has predicted the technological singularity, the rise of the clouds of nano-robots able to complete our immune system and “wipe out” human diseases, the invention of a personal computer with computing capacity of a human brain. Evgeni Magid, Maksim Talanov and Ilya Afanasyev discussed a range of forecasts by Ray Kurzweil in terms of the artificial intelligence and robotics. Predictions made by the experts contained both cautions optimism and a light skepticism.