Age of the AI

Not long ago, Sophia the humanoid robot became the first AI citizen of Saudi Arabia. I haven't even heard about her until videos of interviews started to pop up on my news feed. As a great sci-fi enthusiast I was excited but at the same time a bit sceptical towards her: I mean, have you never seen the terminator? Or A.I.? Or I Robot? Or Transcendence?

I believe we all saw the predicted dangers of creating an AI....

She is about a year old, and in her words: she is a baby with an encyclopedia. Her creator also lets her know in the awakening video that even though she has great knowledge she yet lacks experience and understanding that she must learn on her own. She also met the press and to be honest her reactions sent a chill down my spine. And she also makes me wonder a few things about the robotics...

The interviewer first of all is very sceptical towards her because of Hollywood movies (which she points out is not real).

But can a robot be really self aware? I mean A.Is have been around for some time now, think about Cortana or Siri. We have been familiar with them, and aren't really afraid of them since they are bound... they have the room to improvise but the sentences they can respond with are given. The data they can access are also very limited as well as the data that they can change and find. 

For example if you ask Siri to uninstall an app from your Mac, it will respond with that it is not given the access to do so. 

These programs are written to look very much like they are improvising but actually they aren't really. They are given a pool of information on the internet that they can use, and voice recognition which they translate into text which they use as Google does. And I think Sophia is not really much different, she is just given a larger "pool" of information. I might be narrow minded in the matter but I just can't wrap my head around how could a robot be independent minded with a personality when all it has is coded bricks building up its program. If you don't give it the "brick" of aggression, it won't be able to be aggressive. If you don't program it into its system, it just won't be able to do such things.

I have still so many questions about it, since I cannot fully grasp the idea of artificial intelligence.

However for sure that is true that she is a milestone in human history: She is the first robot to get a Saudi citizenship.. or any citizenship. We are growing in a good direction where people will minimise the chance of fault in the development of buildings or transport.. Maybe AIs like Sophia will help eliminate the problems of world hunger, pollution or even global warming. To that, I look forward to with an open mind. 

Obviously I support the development of tech, because I believe that going forward is what makes us a great species. There are millions of things still to be discovered. There are millions of improvements still to be made. And there are still millions of mistakes still to be corrected. Maybe the development of robotics is what will move us forward. Who knows, maybe 20 years from now, robots will be just another co-worker in the bunch. 

Just think about it. Ideas of AIs being a normal part of life have appeared on many TV shows, especially in the cartoons, like Appleseed or the now made into live action Ghost in the Shell (which has been first made into a series in 1989).. or to dig into bigger classics: Star Wars, Space Odyssey, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, AI or in video games classics like Deus Ex or new releases like Zero Down. We have been wishing for something like this for ages - with of course a bit of fear towards the unknown which resulted in iRobot, Transcendence and the Terminator. But even with the bitter aftertaste we longed for something like this for over 100 years. 

And now that it is here I think it will be here to stay. Nobody believed mobile phones will be a thing, or that stuff like Facetime will ever be more than fiction, but it is reality: and I start to think that if we can imagine it we can make it happen.

To proceed with my train of thought before I lose it: I have read several articles about A.I. before deciding to write this post. And the more I have learnt about them the more I realised that we are not entirely aware that these programs have no independent minds to be exact the way that humans do. They are following a mathematical algorithm that is neither good nor bad, because it cannot be: it is simply logical. 

It is a tool, that evolves but will never be entirely free to think the way the human brain is believed to do.

Not long ago I have read a book that questions the idea of free will somewhat. It is called Villanások by a Hungarian author called László Albert Barabási. Now, I have never got the chance to finish it, but I intend to, since it carries ideas about how predictable our lives are due to the fact that even our brains run on algorithms and the random choices we make aren't actually as random as we think. I do not know if the book was ever translated to English, sadly.

Back to what I wanted to end up at: our brains are working on similar algorithms as Sophia's, per se - this fact very much thins out the line between human and machine if true. And if true, Sophia did very much deserve the citizenship.