Moravec, Hans

Hans Moravec, in full Hans Peter Moravec, (born November 30, 1948, Kautzen, Austria), Austrian-born Canadian computer scientist whose influential work in robotics focused on spatial awareness. He was perhaps best known for his outspoken views on the future of human beings and robots and of the eventual superiority of the latter.

While still a child, Moravec moved with his family from Austria to Canada. There he earned a bachelor’s degree (1969) in mathematics from Acadia University and a master’s degree (1971) in computer science from the University of Western Ontario. After receiving a Ph.D. (1980) in computer science at Stanford University, he moved to Carnegie Mellon University, where he directed the Robotics Institute from 1980 to 2005.

Moravec’s work focused on providing robots with better spatial information. For his dissertation, he created a robot that moved through a crowded environment, using a television picture to help guide it. Although it could move safely through the room about 75 percent of the time, the robot took several hours to complete the task, and it was remote-controlled by a large computer. Moravec later developed “3-D occupancy grids,” which allowed a robot to determine the layout of a real-world environment in several seconds. In 2003 he cofounded Seegrid Corporation, which specialized in automated guided vehicles.

Moravec was probably better known for his opinion that robots would overtake humans in the near future. He estimated that computer intelligence would equal that of humans by 2040 and that machines would far surpass human intellect in the years thereafter. Moravec also argued that biological humans would eventually be rendered extinct. Although he believed there would be ways for human minds to survive in this future, he posited that human bodies would no longer be competitive from an evolutionary perspective. Moravec outlined his views in Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (1988) and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (1999).