Hussein Abbass/The Conversation

Some people believe that humans will always be smarter than robots. Some people say that robots are not as smart as we think.
Some predict that robots will be smarter than humans by 2045. Others say it will take hundreds of years before robots become smarter than humans. Some others predict that robots will be a billion times smarter than humans.
You could think of a robot as a type of computer. Similar to our brain, robots have a computer inside their body to do the thinking for them. These computers are still not as complex as a human brain.
Human vs robot!
About 22 years ago, a robot called Deep Blue played against the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and won the first game. You may say that Deep Blue was smarter than Kasparov because it won the game, but let us think deeper.
Kasparov was extremely good at chess. When he was a child your age, he went to a special school to learn chess. He kept learning and practising chess until he became the best player in the whole world.In 2017, another robot named AlphaGo Zero, learnt to play a much harder game called Go by playing five million games against itself for a few days using an extremely fast computer. A human will take at least 570 years of continuous play without sleep or rest to play five million Go games.
What does it mean to be smart?
Smartness is not just about winning or learning. The humans who designed Deep Blue and AlphaGo were smart because they worked together as a team to solve a problem that nobody could solve before.
Real smartness is to be a good person who helps others when possible, contributes to the community, and works with others to make the world a better place. Humans are smart when they work together, respect one another, and when they help each other in the community. They are smart when they do the right thing like looking after animals who cannot look after themselves.