The American TV series “Westworld” has come to its third season in 2020. Ever since the it released in 2016, I have been wondering the following questions: when can human create Westworld AI robot in the real world? How far is it from now?
Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic for a couple of years, and the AI technology did impact humans’ everyday lives in different aspects. From AlphaGo, robot-assisted surgeries to self-driving cars, AI technology kept amazed us, however, it is still a question when can artificial intelligence works exactly like human brains. David Eagleman, a world-renowned neuroscientist, who served as a scientific consultant on the series stated: “Essentially what AI is good at right now, is just categorization like this is a cat picture versus this is a dog picture and stuff like that. Although it’s superhuman in categorization, it can’t do things like navigate a complex room and pick up objects easily and do social manipulation with language. There’s still a massive gap between how human brains work and even what our best AI can do at the moment.” (Nasa S., 2020)
Can the robots feel?
The improvement of AI technology is driven by data, and currently AI is good at processing as the left side of human brains, assisting human on large and complicated tasks which is ineffective to be done by humans themselves. The challenge now is to train AI to be like the right side of the brain, teaching AI to develop empathy. Indeed, there are AI technologies now that are developed to read humans’ voice and facial expressions and are used in industries. However, because of the subjective nature of emotions, emotional AI is especially prone to bias. (Purdy M., Zealley J., Maseli O. ,2019) At this stage, it is still hard to expect that robots can react like human as emotional intelligence AI are still in the development.
First AI Humanoid Robot-Sophia
The most famous social humanoid robot should be Sophia who appeared in 2016 and is now a Saudi Arabian citizen. She was designed to be a suitable companion for the elderly at nursing homes or to help crowds at large events (Nasa S. 2020). We have seen Sophia appeared in a lot of talk shows and exhibitions, showing her capabilities to us. Although we did amaze by Sophia’s interactions with audience, it is obvious that she is far from Dolores in Westworld. There are still a lot need to be worked on in developing sentient robots just like what Westworld did.
Sources:
Nasa S. (May 8th, 2020). How Westworld could be Predicting the Future of AI and Robotics?
https://www.appypie.com/westworld-ai-robotics-future
Purdy M., Zealley J., Maseli O. (Nov. 18th, 2019) The Risks of Using AI to Interpret Human Emotions
https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-risks-of-using-ai-to-interpret-human-emotions
Sophia (Robot), 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)
Picture taken from photographer Carlos Serrao HBO
Dear Tsai Yun-Ju,
Thank you for this article. It is indeed not very clear what the future of AI is. But if robots do learn how to feel, become emphatic, feel emotions, a lot in our society could start to change. Will we start considering robots as humans? Will they start having some rights and will they have to be considered on the same level as humans? Would we trust them more or less than humans? A lot of questions can be thought of and I am curious to see how this will evolve.