It is the age of robotic sapience and the dawn of autonomous technologies. Should we be resistant to change or appalled? We’ve seen how computers can go unhinged, defiling human logic as with the case for IBM’s Watson whose rampant use of crude language warranted a filter after it read the entire folio of abusives in Urban Dictionary. Recently, Microsoft had to effusively apologize for its golden creation, Tay the Twitter Bot who became a racist xenophobe in less than 24 hours after reading and learning from Twitter’s fan base. Hollywood hasn’t helped our image of AI either; director Alex Garland’s vision from his film Ex Machina, shows us the calculating and disturbing actions of a (spoiler alert) manipulative, femme fatale robot who murders her creator.
I won’t go further to describe how humans have been a terrible influence on our rather innocuous and physically limited, adaptive intelligence systems. It is no wonder why the general public has expressed such anxieties over giving up their wheel of control to our robotic overlords. The question of adaptive artificial intelligence and how it can learn and create new experiences is one thing, at least it is relegated to the world of intangible computer land.
They are creeping out and begging for physical motion.