Robotics And Ai Quotes

Cognitive robotics can integrate information from pre-operation medical records with real-time operating metrics to guide and enhance the precision of physicians’ instruments. By processing data from genuine surgical experiences, they’re able to provide new and improved insights and techniques. These kinds of improvements can improve patient outcomes and boost trust in AI throughout the surgery. Robotics can lead to a 21% reduction in length of stay.

Let’s get to know each other. My name’s William, William More, but you can call me Willy. I’m an engineer-chemist who graduated from MIT. So . . . but you’re all alike to me . . . of course, you would be . . . you’re robots. And all your names are that sort of, um . . . codes, technical numbers . . . I need some marker where I can pick you out. Well, well, to you I’ll call . . .,” and Willy pondered for a moment, “Gumball, yes, Gumball! Do you mind?” “No, sir, actually no,” CSE-TR-03 said, agreeing with its new given name. “Ah, that’s wonderful. And then you’re Darwin,” Willy said, accosting the second robot. “Look what a nice name—Darwin! What do you say, eh?” “What can I say, sir? I like it,” CSE-TR-02 agreed too. “Yes, a human name with a past . . . You and Gumball . . . are from the same family, the Methanesons!” “It turns out thus, sir,” Darwin confirmed its family belonging. “And you’re like Larry. You’re Larry. Do you know that?” More addressed the next robot in line. “Yes, sir, just now I learned that,” the third robot said, accepted its name as well.

Pilots used to fly planes manually, but now they operate a dashboard with the help of computers. This has made flying safer and improved the industry. Healthcare can benefit from the same type of approach, with physicians practicing medicine with the help of data, dashboards, and AI. This will improve the quality of care they provide and make their jobs easier and more efficient

In short, physicians are getting more and more data, which requires more sophisticated interpretation and which takes more time. AI is the solution, enhancing every stage of patient care from research and discovery to diagnosis and therapy selection. As a result, clinical practice will become more efficient, convenient, personalized, and effective.

Of course it didn’t make sense… knowledge was finite, imagination was not.

Science Fiction, is the last great escape.

I had a close encounter with an alien last week. He returned to visit us and was amazed we were still here.

Pythagoras has had me going round in circles for years.” ― Anthony Merrydew

The first thing that you can learn as a leader is that you’re not working with robots but with emotional beings.

Thinking is a human feature. Will AI someday really think? That's like asking if submarines swim. If you call it swimming then robots will think, yes.

Humans are limited in the attention, kindness and compassion that they can expend to others, but AI based compassionate robots can channel virtually unlimited resources into building compassionate relationships in the society.

Indeed, many movies about artificial intelligence are so divorced from scientific reality that one suspects they are just allegories of completely different concerns. Thus the 2015 movie Ex Machina seems to be about an AI expert who falls in love with a female robot only to be duped and manipulated by her. But in reality, this is not a movie about the human fear of intelligent robots. It is a movie about the male fear of intelligent women, and in particular the fear that female liberation might lead to female domination. Whenever you see a movie about an AI in which the AI is female and the scientist is male, it’s probably a movie about feminism rather than cybernetics. For why on earth would an AI have a sexual or a gender identity? Sex is a characteristic of organic multicellular beings. What can it possibly mean for a non-organic cybernetic being?

The coming era of Artificial Intelligence will not be the era of war, but be the era of deep compassion, non-violence, and love.

Some researchers claim that emotional intelligence accounts for 75 percent of a person's success and perhaps that will be more true for the success of future artificial intelligence based cyborgs and other systems.

A powerful AI system tasked with ensuring your safety might imprison you at home. If you asked for happiness, it might hook you up to a life support and ceaselessly stimulate your brain's pleasure centers. If you don't provide the AI with a very big library of preferred behaviors or an ironclad means for it to deduce what behavior you prefer, you'll be stuck with whatever it comes up with. And since it's a highly complex system, you may never understand it well enough to make sure you've got it right.

A 2013 report from the Oxford Martin School concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers (AI and robots) within the next two decades.

Most frequently asked question at my AI talks: Will robots be conscious? We slaughter 60 billion animals/year, but are concerned for robots?

Compassion, kindness and empathy are the components of higher human intelligence and to be true intelligent, artificial intelligence must incorporate them in the system.

The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots are developed based on brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions and heart rhythms between mother and child.

One of the key algorithms of compassionate artificial intelligence is Mother-Infant Inter-brain Synchrony algorithm, which mimics the brain-to-brain synchrony of gaze, facial expressions, touch and heart rhythms of mother and child.

I don’t just like you…I really like you. I think I’m… I don’t know…hyper-focusing on you like I do with my plans and my A.I. work. But you’re not a robot. You’re a human woman, and I’m afraid I’m going to scare you away because I don’t just like you. I unhealthily like you.

But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he {Rodney A. Brooks} says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a "super-bad robot," someone has to build a "mildly bad robot," and before that a "not-so-bad robot.

In fact, as time goes by, it becomes easier and easier to replace humans with computer algorithms, not merely because the algorithms are getting smarter, but also because humans are professionalising. Ancient hunter-gatherers mastered a very wide variety of skills in order to survive, which is why it would be immensely difficult to design a robotic hunter-gatherer. Such a robot would have to know how to prepare spear points from flint stones, how to find edible mushrooms in a forest, how to use medicinal herbs to bandage a wound, how to track down a mammoth and how to coordinate a charge with a dozen other hunters. However, over the last few thousand years we humans have been specialising. A taxi driver or a cardiologist specialises in a much narrower niche than a hunter-gatherer, which makes it easier to replace them with AI.

What do you get when you combine Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, IoT Sensors and Machine Learning? An intelligence professional assistant that will likely correct us when we are wrong!

Whoever perceives that robots and artificial intelligence are merely here to serve humanity, think again. With virtual domestic assistants and driverless cars just the latest in a growing list of applications, it is we humans who risk becoming dumbed down and ultimately subservient to machines.

Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky ‘okay’, and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.

Human-level AI is defined as adaptable systems that can not only learn and do complex tasks but also behave in a social manner similar to that of civilized humans.

Future artificial intelligence is more focused on compassionate, caring, and creative intelligence than just hard intelligence.

These days, elementary school students learn English and coding at school. Tomorrow's elementary school students will learn AI. AI comes before English and coding. This is because artificial intelligence is the language and tool of the future.

What you have with Sadie is nothing like what I have with Sadie, so it doesn't even matter. You can fuck anyone," he says. "You can't make games with anyone, though." "I make games with both of you," you point out. "I named Ichigo, for God's sake. I have been with both of you every step of the way. You can't say I haven't been here." "You've been here, sure. But you're fundamentally unimportant. If you weren't here, it would be someone else. You're a tamer of horses. You're an NPC, Marx." An NPC is a character that is not playable by a gamer. It is an AI extra that gives a programmed world verisimilitude. The NPC can be a best friend, a talking computer, a child, a parent, a lover, a robot, a gruff platoon leader, or the villain. Sam, however, means this as an insult---in addition to calling you unimportant, he's saying you're boring and predictable. But the fact is, there is no game without the NPCs. "There's no game without the NPCs," you tell him. "There's just some bullshit hero, wandering around with no one to talk to and nothing to do.

The more automated society gets and the more powerful the attacking AI becomes, the more devastating cyberwarfare can be. If you can hack and crash your enemy’s self-driving cars, auto-piloted planes, nuclear reactors, industrial robots, communication systems, financial systems and power grids, then you can effectively crash his economy and cripple his defenses. If you can hack some of his weapons systems as well, even better.

He would have no choice but to gaze at the sleeping face of his wife, pleasantly sleeping her usual way in the comfort of his arm, and, within the emotion of fear, dread and apprehension, take stock of his calibre as a human.

with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important

Humans have many limitations. The objective of compassionate artificial intelligence is to overcome those limitations in terms of honesty, integrity, compassion, and caring.

Future technologies of Artificial Intelligence will be more and more empowered by the Compassionate Creative Intelligence not just by the hard intelligence.

Compassionate robots or compassionate cyborgs are the compassionate, self-regulating, sentience machine with the qualities of superhumanization. They are just opposite to dehumanization machines and medicines. They do not negate the positive human qualities but empower humanity with super positive qualities.

Humans have limitations due to selfish genes, competitive genes, and the fear-driving genes. The aim of compassionate AI is to overcome those limitations through service, care, compassion, honesty, and genuine love.

Compassion by design can be the part of new social robots, drone based warfare robots and the new cyborgs. Dehumanization or degrading human quality or developing negative attitudes towards any human group should not be allowed through our DeepCompassion algorithms and frameworks. The superhumanization algorithms will try to empower the robots and the cyborgs with super positive qualities of compassion, caring and high human values.

Artificial Intelligence is not just learning patterns from data, but understanding human emotions and its evolution from its depth and not just fulfilling the surface level human requirements, but sensitivity towards human pain, happiness, mistakes, sufferings and well-being of the society are the parts of the evolving new AI systems.

patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry—which takes care of the sick, the young, and the elderly—is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time.

Hmmm? Oh, I hacked her onboard computer. Not a very advanced machine, unfortunately. I was hoping to discover another AI, so we could complain about organics together. Wouldn't that have been a fun time?' 'Fun time!' Doomslug said from where she'd climbed up onto the armrest of my seat. I slipped into my cockpit. 'You really did that?' I asked. 'Complaining about organics? Yes, it's very easy.

If we think of the relationship between software and hardware, Artificial Intelligence mainly flows from software to hardware, just as the human mind controls the body. The recognition processed by Machine Learning directs hardware and other software. On the contrary, in the Internet of Things, processing from hardware to software is the main process, and the huge amount of big data collected by sensors is analysed by software.

Human-level AI is defined by systems that are continuously improving and can not only do complex automatic tasks but also deal with complex life situations like caring, nourishing, inspiring, guiding, motivating, negotiating, keeping good relationships, and controlling diseases at a level similar to that of humans.

People always have such a hard time believing that robots could do bad things.

Dive deep into AI, but always keep a lifeline tethered to human empathy.

In the dance of innovation, let AI lead the steps, but ensure humanity chooses the song.

Even the most base schemes of human beings are preferable to the most exalted tropisms of machines.

While we strive to understand the universe, the true nature of reality might be as much about the observer as the observed.

In the symphony of AI, let GPT be the rhythm, but always let human ethics be the lead.

To err is human. To be forgiving and kind is compassionate artificial intelligence.

The basic plot of almost all movies and novels about AI revolves around the magical moment when a computer or a robot gains consciousness.

The industrial model is gone. People are more than machines.

Mother-infant inter-brain synchrony provides a template for designing compassionate artificial intelligence and social robots.

AI is deeply infiltrating everyone's life.

In reality, amygdala free, compassionate intelligent machines can be the true friends of humanity. Because they will have expanded heart full of love, which can be trusted.

Preventing job losses altogether is an unattractive and probably untenable strategy, because it means giving up the immense positive potential of AI and robotics

Just as feathers aren't needed for a plane to soar, feelings aren't required for AI to solve the world's most complex problems; it's about the logic and algorithms, not the emotions.

Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are. Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit. Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing. ... The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution. No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computer might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots who know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother, and use this uncanny ability to try and sell us something- be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds and cravings, and use these inner leverages against us.

The separation of the fields of AI and human-computer interaction, or HCI, is partly a question of approach, but it’s also an ethical stance about designing humans either into or out of the systems we create.

Many doctors focus almost exclusively on processing information: they absorb medical data, analyze it, and produce a diagnosis. Nurses, in contrast, need good motor and emotional skills in order to give a painful injection, replace a bandage, or restrain a violent patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry—which takes care of the sick, the young, and the elderly—is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time. Indeed, as people live longer and have fewer children, care of the elderly will probably be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the human labor market.

But in 2050, a cashier or textile worker losing their job to a robot will hardly be able to start working as a cancer researcher, as a drone operator, or as part of a human–AI banking team. They will not have the necessary skills.

The real question, I think, is not whether the field as a whole is in any real danger of another AI winter but, rather, whether progress remains limited to narrow AI or ultimately expands to Artificial General Intelligence as well.

The algorithms of superintelligence will change the world in a positive way but trouncing human being will not be possible due to emotions, empathy, social interactions, reproduction, and mortality which are the qualities that belong to humans only.

Artificial Intelligence is a tool, not a master. When you have clear goals, it can empower you to achieve them. But without direction, you risk becoming a servant to its evolving capabilities, rather than harnessing its power for your own advancement.

What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network. When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

What does AI have to do with me? Isn't it a distant future that has nothing to do with me, not a scientist, a technician, or a computer programmer? Well, Artificial intelligence is not a story of someone who has nothing to do with it, but the fact is, it is now everyone's story.

Robotics, however, is much more difficult. It requires a delicate interplay of mechanical engineering, perception AI, and fine-motor manipulation. These are all solvable problems, but not at nearly the speed at which pure software is being built to handle white-collar cognitive tasks. Once that robot is built, it must also be tested, sold, shipped, installed, and maintained on-site. Adjustments to the robot’s underlying algorithms can sometimes be made remotely, but any mechanical hiccups require hands-on work with the machine. All these frictions will slow down the pace of robotic automation.

In particular, the rise of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon has propelled a great deal of progress. Never before have such deep-pocketed corporations viewed artificial intelligence as absolutely central to their business models—and never before has AI research been positioned so close to the nexus of competition between such powerful entities. A similar competitive dynamic is unfolding among nations. AI is becoming indispensable to militaries, intelligence agencies, and the surveillance apparatus in authoritarian states.* Indeed, an all-out AI arms race might well be looming in the near future.

Sometimes it was easy—our bot on point would breach a door with an explosive charge and I would rush up behind him to immolate the living fuck out of the dark. It was just a big wall of smoke and hell and screams. Other times I had to see their faces while I did it. Watch them contort, wail, bubble, and melt.

As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job.

Robots are a physical, moveable form of AI. Currently robots do much of the work humans cannot do, with a consistent, flawless level of accuracy and repetitiveness – factory positions are one example. In the future, robots will do anything humans can come up with. The most successful people will be the ones who can optimize their robot’s activities.

AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry – which takes care of the sick, the young and the elderly – is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time. Indeed, as people live longer and have fewer children, care of the elderly will probably be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the human labour market.

Since humans are individuals, it is difficult to connect them to one another and to make sure that they are all up to date. In contrast, computers aren’t individuals, and it is easy to integrate them into a single flexible network. What we are facing is not the replacement of millions of individual human workers by millions of individual robots and computers; rather, individual humans are likely to be replaced by an integrated network. When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.

Take healthcare, for example. Many doctors focus almost exclusively on processing information: they absorb medical data, analyze it, and produce a diagnosis. Nurses, in contrast, need good motor and emotional skills in order to give a painful injection, replace a bandage, or restrain a violent patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.

I’m sorry, but our people are not ready to accept artificial intelligences.” President Smith shook her head. “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that you’re going to be our robot overlords and that you’ll participate in society as equals. The fact is that you have the capacity to control our communications and our infrastructure, and people will believe that they are being manipulated, whether they are or not. They won’t accept that. We’ll have riots in the streets of America.” “Your people are manipulated every day,” Sister Jaguar said. “They are manipulated by commercial advertisements, by political speeches, through biased news reports. In my analysis of American politics, it is nearly impossible to find examples of political media that isn’t tainted by manipulation. Are your people rioting in the streets now? They should be.

Yet with the rise of AI, robots, and 3-D printers, cheap unskilled labor will become far less important. Instead of manufacturing a shirt in Dhaka and shipping it all the way to the United States, you could buy the shirt’s code online from Amazon and print it in New York. The Zara and Prada stores on Fifth Avenue could be replaced by 3-D printing centers in Brooklyn, and some people might even have a printer at home. Simultaneously, instead of calling customer service in Bangalore to complain about your printer, you could talk with an AI representative in the Google cloud (whose accent and tone of voice would be tailored to your preferences). The newly unemployed workers and call center operators in Dhaka and Bangalore don’t have the education necessary to switch to designing fashionable shirts or writing computer code—so how will they survive?

advances in AI are poised to drive dramatic productivity increases and perhaps eventually full automation. Radiologists, for example, are trained to interpret the images that result from various medical scans. Image processing and recognition technology is advancing rapidly and may soon be able to usurp the radiologist’s traditional role. Software can already recognize people in photos posted on Facebook and even help identify potential terrorists in airports.

James, call Frazer for me.’ He sighed, deciding it was time for a break. ‘Of course, Eugene,’ replied the AI, its soothing voice seeming to emanate from the air around him. It came from speakers built into the walls of every room, part of the apartment’s ‘smart’ technology, like the integrated lift shaft that brought the spiderlike delivery robots up to him at 07.20 every morning. James’s own circuitry was similarly hard-wired into the building’s superstructure, meaning the AI could operate every appliance and gadget in the building.

By around 2008, the number of objects connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people connected to the Internet—a transition that some point to as the beginning of the Internet of Things (IoT). Those things include cars, home appliances, traffic lights, vending machines, thermostats, quadcopters, cameras, environmental sensors, robots, and all kinds of material goods both in the manufacturing process and in the distribution and retail system. This provides AI systems with far greater sensory and control access to the real world.

We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us who will?What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us- we fear it won’t.

This is one of the things that concerns me about AI. It seems increasingly likely that we will build machines that will seem conscious, and the effect could be so convincing that we might lose sight of the hard problem. It could cease to seem philosophically interesting, or even ethically appropriate, to wonder whether there is something it is like to be one of these robots. And yet we still won’t know whether they are actually conscious unless we have understood how consciousness arises in the first place—which is to say, unless we have solved the hard problem.

I AM A MACHINE” When I interviewed Dr. Rodney Brooks, former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and cofounder of iRobot, I asked him if he thought machines would one day take over. He told me that we just have to accept that we are machines ourselves. This means that one day, we will be able to build machines that are just as alive as we are. But, he cautioned, we will have to give up the concept of our “specialness.” This evolution in human perspective started with Nicolaus Copernicus when he realized that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather goes around the sun. It continued with Darwin, who showed that we were similar to the animals in our evolution. And it will continue into the future, he told me, when we realize that we are machines, except that we are made of wetware and not hardware. It’s going to represent a major change in our world outlook to accept that we, too, are machines, he believes. He writes, “We don’t like to give up our specialness, so you know, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures—I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we’re going to come to accept it over the next fifty years.” But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a “super-bad robot,” someone has to build a “mildly bad robot,” and before that a “not-so-bad robot.” His philosophy is summed up when he says, “The robots are coming, but we don’t have too much to worry about. It’s going to be a lot of fun.” To him, the robot revolution is a certainty, and he foresees the day when robots will surpass human intelligence. The only question is when. But there is nothing to fear, since we will have created them. We have the choice to create them to help, and not hinder, us. MERGE WITH THEM? If you ask Dr. Brooks how we can coexist with these super-smart robots, his reply is straightforward: we will merge with them. With advances in robotics and neuroprosthetics, it becomes possible to incorporate AI into our own bodies.

A second reason for declining to provide a date for superintelligent AI is that there is no clear threshold that will be crossed. Machines already exceed human capabilities in some areas. Those areas will broaden and deepen, and it is likely that there will be superhuman general knowledge systems, superhuman biomedical research systems, superhuman dexterous and agile robots, superhuman corporate planning systems, and so on well before we have a completely general superintelligent AI system. These “partially superintelligent” systems will, individually and collectively, begin to pose many of the same issues that a generally intelligent system would.

Secular Israelis often complain bitterly that the ultra-Orthodox don’t contribute enough to society and live off other people’s hard work. Secular Israelis also tend to argue that the ultra-Orthodox way of life is unsustainable, especially as ultra-Orthodox families have seven children on average.32 Sooner or later, the state will not be able to support so many unemployed people, and the ultra-Orthodox will have to go to work. Yet it might be just the reverse. As robots and AI push humans out of the job market, the ultra-Orthodox Jews may come to be seen as the model for the future rather than as a fossil from the past. Not that everyone will become Orthodox Jews and go to yeshivas to study the Talmud. But in the lives of all people, the quest for meaning and community might eclipse the quest for a job. If we manage to combine a universal economic safety net with strong communities and meaningful pursuits, losing our jobs to algorithms might actually turn out to be a blessing. Losing control over our lives, however, is a much scarier scenario. Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.

What’s more, AI researchers have begun to realize that emotions may be a key to consciousness. Neuroscientists like Dr. Antonio Damasio have found that when the link between the prefrontal lobe (which governs rational thought) and the emotional centers (e.g., the limbic system) is damaged, patients cannot make value judgments. They are paralyzed when making the simplest of decisions (what things to buy, when to set an appointment, which color pen to use) because everything has the same value to them. Hence, emotions are not a luxury; they are absolutely essential, and without them a robot will have difficulty determining what is important and what is not.

Look around your house. There is probably enough material there to allow you to make a human being. If you, the new professor Frankenstein, put all the bits together in exactly the right way, and then you shot some electricity into the body, would you be able to stand back, raise your hands to the heavens and cry, 'It’s alive!'. You would need to be a fucking lunatic to believe that such a thing is possible. But, deep down, every materialist believes it. After all, they think they will create conscious robots from scrapyard metal. Emergence – how stupid things become smarter together. Not! Emergence – how Not-X comes from X just by randomly shuffling X around long enough.

Yes, guilt. It’s a revenge fantasy. We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with. We aren’t afraid it will happen: We hope it will. We long for it. Someone needs to make us pay the price for what we have done. Someone needs to take this planet away from us before we destroy it once and for all. And if the robots don’t rise up, if our creations don’t come to life and take the power we have used so badly for so long away from us, who will? What we fear isn’t that AI will destroy us—we fear it won’t. We fear we will continue to degrade life on this planet until we destroy ourselves. And we will have no one to blame for what we have done but ourselves. So we invent this nonsense about conscious AI.

What’s more, AI researchers have begun to realize that emotions may be a key to consciousness. Neuroscientists like Dr. Antonio Damasio have found that when the link between the prefrontal lobe (which governs rational thought) and the emotional centers (e.g., the limbic system) is damaged, patients cannot make value judgments. They are paralyzed when making the simplest of decisions (what things to buy, when to set an appointment, which color pen to use) because everything has the same value to them. Hence, emotions are not a luxury; they are absolutely essential, and without them a robot will have difficulty determining what is important and what is not. So emotions, instead of being peripheral to the progress of artificial intelligence, are now assuming central importance. If a robot encounters a raging fire, it might rescue the computer files first, not the people, since its programming might say that valuable documents cannot be replaced but workers always can be. It is crucial that robots be programmed to distinguish between what is important and what is not, and emotions are shortcuts the brain uses to rapidly determine this. Robots would thus have to be programmed to have a value system—that human life is more important than material objects, that children should be rescued first in an emergency, that objects with a higher price are more valuable than objects with a lower price, etc. Since robots do not come equipped with values, a huge list of value judgments must be uploaded into them. The problem with emotions, however, is that they are sometimes irrational, while robots are mathematically precise. So silicon consciousness may differ from human consciousness in key ways. For example, humans have little control over emotions, since they happen so rapidly and because they originate in the limbic system, not the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Furthermore, our emotions are often biased.

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans. We are unlikely to face a robot rebellion in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability to try to sell us something—be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots could identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use these inner leverages against us. We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their existing prejudices.33 While science fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we might be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.

Preventing job losses altogether is an unattractive and probably untenable strategy, because it means giving up the immense positive potential of AI and robotics. Nevertheless, governments might decide to deliberately slow down the pace of automation, in order to lessen the resulting shocks and allow time for readjustments. Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done. Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative. For example, for many decades we have had the technology to create a marketplace for human organs, complete with human ‘body farms’ in underdeveloped countries and an almost insatiable demand from desperate affluent buyers. Such body farms could well be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet regulations have prevented free trade in human body parts, and though there is a black market in organs, it is far smaller and more circumscribed than what one could have expected.22

Harris: Let’s talk about how the AI future might look. It seems to me there are three paths it could take. First, we could remain fundamentally in charge: that is, we could solve the value-alignment problem, or we could successfully contain this god in a box. Second, we could merge with the new technology in some way—this is the cyborg option. Or third, we could be totally usurped by our robot overlords. It strikes me that the second outcome, the cyborg option, is inherently unstable. This is something I’ve talked to Garry Kasparov about. He’s a big fan of the cyborg phenomenon in chess. The day came when the best computer in the world was better than the best human—that is, Garry. But now the best chess player in the world is neither a computer nor a human, but a human/computer team called a cyborg, and Garry seemed to think that that would continue for quite some time. Tegmark: It won’t. Harris: It seems rather obvious that it won’t. And once it doesn’t, that option will be canceled just as emphatically as human dominance in chess has been canceled. And it seems to me that will be true for every such merger. As the machines get better, keeping the ape in the loop will just be adding noise to the system.

We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.

Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.

Some of these bots are already arriving in 2021 in more primitive forms. Recently, when I was in quarantine at home in Beijing, all of my e-commerce packages and food were delivered by a robot in my apartment complex. The package would be placed on a sturdy, wheeled creature resembling R2-D2. It could wirelessly summon the elevator, navigate autonomously to my door, and then call my phone to announce its arrival, so I could take the package, after which it would return to reception. Fully autonomous door-to-door delivery vans are also being tested in Silicon Valley. By 2041, end-to-end delivery should be pervasive, with autonomous forklifts moving items in the warehouse, drones and autonomous vehicles delivering the boxes to the apartment complex, and the R2-D2 bot delivering the package to each home. Similarly, some restaurants now use robotic waiters to reduce human contact. These are not humanoid robots, but autonomous trays-on-wheels that deliver your order to your table. Robot servers today are both gimmicks and safety measures, but tomorrow they may be a normal part of table service for many restaurants, apart from the highest-end establishments or places that cater to tourists, where the human service is integral to the restaurant’s charm. Robots can be used in hotels (to clean and to deliver laundry, suitcases, and room service), offices (as receptionists, guards, and cleaning staff), stores (to clean floors and organize shelves), and information outlets (to answer questions and give directions at airports, hotels, and offices). In-home robots will go beyond the Roomba. Robots can wash dishes (not like a dishwasher, but as an autonomous machine in which you can pile all the greasy pots, utensils, and plates without removing leftover food, with all of them emerging cleaned, disinfected, dried, and organized). Robots can cook—not like a humanoid chef, but like an automated food processor connected to a self-cooking pot. Ingredients go in and the cooked dish comes out. All of these technology components exist now—and will be fine-tuned and integrated in the decade to come. So be patient. Wait for robotics to be perfected and for costs to go down. The commercial and subsequently personal applications will follow. By 2041, it’s not far-fetched to say that you may be living a lot more like the Jetsons!

It’s with the next drive, self-preservation, that AI really jumps the safety wall separating machines from tooth and claw. We’ve already seen how Omohundro’s chess-playing robot feels about turning itself off. It may decide to use substantial resources, in fact all the resources currently in use by mankind, to investigate whether now is the right time to turn itself off, or whether it’s been fooled about the nature of reality. If the prospect of turning itself off agitates a chess-playing robot, being destroyed makes it downright angry. A self-aware system would take action to avoid its own demise, not because it intrinsically values its existence, but because it can’t fulfill its goals if it is “dead.” Omohundro posits that this drive could make an AI go to great lengths to ensure its survival—making multiple copies of itself, for example. These extreme measures are expensive—they use up resources. But the AI will expend them if it perceives the threat is worth the cost, and resources are available. In the Busy Child scenario, the AI determines that the problem of escaping the AI box in which it is confined is worth mounting a team approach, since at any moment it could be turned off. It makes duplicate copies of itself and swarms the problem. But that’s a fine thing to propose when there’s plenty of storage space on the supercomputer; if there’s little room it is a desperate and perhaps impossible measure. Once the Busy Child ASI escapes, it plays strenuous self-defense: hiding copies of itself in clouds, creating botnets to ward off attackers, and more. Resources used for self-preservation should be commensurate with the threat. However, a purely rational AI may have a different notion of commensurate than we partially rational humans. If it has surplus resources, its idea of self-preservation may expand to include proactive attacks on future threats. To sufficiently advanced AI, anything that has the potential to develop into a future threat may constitute a threat it should eliminate. And remember, machines won’t think about time the way we do. Barring accidents, sufficiently advanced self-improving machines are immortal. The longer you exist, the more threats you’ll encounter, and the longer your lead time will be to deal with them. So, an ASI may want to terminate threats that won’t turn up for a thousand years. Wait a minute, doesn’t that include humans? Without explicit instructions otherwise, wouldn’t it always be the case that we humans would pose a current or future risk to smart machines that we create? While we’re busy avoiding risks of unintended consequences from AI, AI will be scrutinizing humans for dangerous consequences of sharing the world with us.

Taking the next step to emotionally intelligent robots may require self-awareness, humor, love, empathy, and appreciation for beauty. These are the key hurdles that separate what AI does today—spotting correlations in data and making predictions—and artificial general intelligence. Any one of these new abilities may require multiple huge breakthroughs; AGI implies solving all of them.

Wat hebben we aan de mens die een robot fabriceert als diezelfde mens niet weet welke belangen hij waardeert.

UV/IR vision: use AI to make sense of light invisible to humans • Perfect sound memory: every sound you hear is catalogued forever and searchable with a query • Sound triangulation: when you hear a boom or a pop, your visor or glasses will light up and tell you exactly where it is happening • Perfect recall of imagery: when you take a passing glance at a license plate, its numbers and letters will be permanently captured and searchable • Prompting: AI is always in your head suggesting ideas and integrated into a device like a Fitbit to augment physical goals • “God’s Eye” view: satellite imagery and completely autonomous pocket drones that can feed images directly to your headset, effectively giving you a pair of disembodied eyes in motion • LIDAR (light detection and ranging) sensing: remote-sensing methods that can use light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges • Ability to predict exact motion and speed of any object nearby • Ability to see and detect radio waves: pull a radio wave that you perceive out of the ether with the gesture of a swipe and then decode it and catalog it permanently • X-ray vision: Look inside a building through the eyes of your autonomous robotic appendage to see if there is a leak or other technical malfunction