Almost Human

Almost Human

   The recent movie, Ex Machina, posed an interesting question of what happens when robots begin retaining so much intelligence that they can reformulate their thinking, moving beyond simple data to actually forming original thoughts.  Often termed AI or Artificial Intelligence, the author of the movie told Wired this when asked about the ethics of AI: It's a big question.  If you're talking about nonsentient AIs, then there's a lot to be concerned about.  But if you create a new consciousness in the form of a machine, that isn't significantly different from two adults creating a child.

   The subject of consciousness in a robot was just one of the themes in Isaac Asimov's collection of stories from I, Robot, one story taking place on a battlefield where a robot witnesses other robots in the field being destroyed and is then told to go out and retrieve a part from a "dead" robot, almost guaranteeing the destruction of that robot as well.  The robot recognizes this, and hesitates, with you the reader viewing the mechanical thinking of the robot thought process (a view of what one site considers 20 of the top books on robots is listed here).  Similar thoughts occurred in the short-lived television series (not the movie of the same name), Almost Human, where police were required to work with a human-like robot partner.

   In the movie Ex Machina, however, what the female-shaped robot notices is that the young male human she is talking to is disturbed by her mechanical look and thus goes off, returning fully covered, wearing a dress and stockings (her face is already strikingly pretty in its human features).  The male (and the viewer) almost immediately begin relating a bit more easily to this non-robot-looking machine (think Terminator with a smile).  If you think this might not be reality, imagine what some Japanese shoppers are dealing with as they encounter their first human-looking robot greeting them as an assistant, one who speaks multiple languages...meet Aiko Chihira in this photo from Reuters (yes, she blinks).

    Robots with intelligence are appearing almost daily, working vineyards with precision (one, based on the movie Wall-E by Disney, is outfitted with 3-D recognition software and is named Wall-YE), playing financial advisor (with names such as Betterment, WealthFront, Jemstep and FutureAdvisor...the newer bots will allow you to talk to an actual person but the robots are cheaper and in some cases, proving more efficient), and even designing new recipes.  This is the most recent project of IBM's Watson who's already conquered Jeopardy and medicine, the AI already pounding out recipes such as Bengali Butternut BBQ Sauce and "an old-fashioned brewed with chicken broth," says Fortune.  From Watson's site: Unlike other computing systems, Watson takes in data from all sorts of sources, from research reports to Tweets.  All the information humans produce for other humans to consume.  However, Watson is not bound by volume or memory; Watson can read millions of unstructured documents in seconds...Watson is discovering and offering answers and patterns we hadn’t known existed, faster than any person or group of people ever could.  

    Imagine millions of patent applications or law books read in seconds (both processes already exist in AI, saving patent inspectors and law offices thousands of hours).  Now imagine a robot assisting you in a hospital (those exist as well, delivering and dispensing medicine to aid nurses).  But suppose you could now have a robot assisting you at home.  You could design the robot to appear however you wanted, as a human or a machine, perhaps even as someone you miss, someone who has passed away (the outer casing wouldn't matter, unless you wanted a menacing appearance as in RoboCop).  What would the complications and emotions be?  This scenario appeared on the early series, The Twilight Zone, when a science craft returns to rescue a scientist on a distant outpost, a site where a female companion robot has been left with the scientist for company.  His reluctance to leave is puzzling to the rescuers, for how could he become so attached to a robot (the rescuers eventually shoot the robot to expose the machinery inside, but still the scientist is in disbelief).  But if the robot in your home looked like your deceased spouse, or your child, or your dog...would you be willing to suffer the loss again?  Watching the movie, the robot reflecting empathy and near-affection, viewers might find themselves slowly being pulled into the near future, one where Aiko-like robots will be commonplace.

   But should that happen, what would occur if the internal software suddenly went haywire, linking and creating a  "robopocalypse," as Chris Taylor reported in his opinion at Mashable: What we're really talking about is a primitive urge that goes back far further than 1921.  It's what drove the first Luddites to smash mill owners' machines in Manchester — the fear, not of the technology itself, but of its impact in the workplace.  We fear replacement.  We fear becoming obsolete, itself a kind of death.  Robots are designed with Isaac Asimov's three laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

   Like it or not, robots are likely here to stay, advancing far beyond the factory robots that do our repetitive jobs with accuracy and speed (Google recently purchased DeepMind, a new coding that learns from its victories and failures, what some consider the next phase after Watson).  And who knows, the outlook might prove to be enlightening, maybe even funny as shown in Robot & Frank.  In the future, when we ask "what were you thinking?," we may receive the same puzzled look from a robot as we do from a human.  Indeed, as with humans, we may never know...