The year that Sónar launched its Stage D for great talks with multiple screens around it, it became clear that those who went up to that stage would have to know how to act. And the show by Kate Darling, the expert in robotics ethics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who yesterday addressed the issue of the relationship that human beings will have to establish with artificial intelligence, met those requirements.
In the half hour that her illustrated talk lasted – with images in which she appeared, for example, herself swimming with a robot dolphin for therapeutic use – she left a hundred people wondering if it would be ok in the end. loving pet animals that pretend to be real equally as those that do relieve themselves. But the material, very serious, attracted, without going any further, scholars from the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, since this type of product is used with people with dementia. Darling already said it: the anthropomorphology of robots matters.
“If we imagine them as humanoids it is because – he added – we are constantly comparing their intelligence to ours, but their way of understanding the world is different. Why want to reproduce human intelligence if we can do something different?” the researcher wondered. “What you have to do is open your mind to the possible uses of this technology and stop assuming that it will replace people. We’ve been blaming joblessness on robots for 50 years, but it would be fairer to blame business decisions driven by rampant corporate capitalism.”
The hot topic, however, is that as much as AI doesn’t feel, the tendency will be for people to perceive that they do have feelings, or at least behave as if they do. And that will bring ethical problems, because the difference between an animal and an AI is that the former does not reveal your secrets. But AI can be used against your interests.
“What worries me is not that your sex robot will replace your partner, but that the robot will manipulate and take advantage of you. Soon we will have to face that. We can’t stop people from treating technology like it’s alive, and maybe we shouldn’t, because when I see a kid making friends with the vacuum cleaner or a soldier chatting with his robot, I don’t see stupid people, just the instinct to to be nice. And maybe it’s not something that needs to be eradicated, just steered in the right direction to protect people.”
His staging was so sharp and smart (perfect, wow), with that fleeting “thank you very much” with which he said goodbye after letting go of the last one – “don’t forget that robots don’t determine the future, we do us”–, there were those who almost doubted if the Kate who had acted was not a mechanical clone that supplanted, like a franchise, the original.
It was even doubted, once in the Village, whether the beautiful singer-songwriter Crystal Murray who graced the great musical stage was not really an optical illusion that responded to the preferences of each spectator. It is the effect of advanced information combined with drinks and non-stop dancing… the lucidity of sleepiness made in Sónar.
