The year Sónar launched its Stage D for formidable talks with multiple screens around it, it became clear that those who took to the stage should know how to act. And the show by Kate Darling, the robotics ethics expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who yesterday addressed the issue of the relationship that humans will have to establish with artificial intelligences, met these requirements.
In the half an hour that her illustrated talk lasted – with images in which she appeared, for example, she was swimming with a therapeutic robot dolphin – she left a hundred people wondering if it will be ok in the end. to love pets that pretend to be real as well as those that do relieve themselves. This does not change the fact that the material, very serious, attracted scholars from the Pasqual Maragall Foundation without going any further, 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 humanoid it is because we are constantly comparing their intelligence with ours – he added – but their way of understanding the world is different from that of humans. Why do we want to reproduce human intelligence if we can do something different?”, asked the researcher. “What needs to be done is to open the mind to the possible uses of this technology and stop taking it for granted that it will replace people. We have been blaming robots for the lack of employment for 50 years, but it would be fairer to blame it on business decisions driven by rampant corporate capitalism.”
The burning issue, however, is that as much as AI does not have feelings, the tendency will be for people to perceive that it does, or at least behave as if it does. And this will bring ethical problems, since the difference between an animal and an AI is that the former does not reveal your secrets. AI, on the other hand, 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 you and take advantage of you. Soon we will have to face it. We can’t stop people from treating technology like it’s alive, and maybe we don’t need to, because when I see a kid befriending a vacuum cleaner or a soldier talking to his robot, I don’t see stupid people, just the instinct to be kind. And maybe it’s not something that needs to be eradicated, just guided in the right direction to protect people.”
So sharp and smart (perfect, wow) was his staging, with that fleeting “thank you very much” after letting go of the last one and disappearing behind the stage – “don’t forget that the robots they don’t determine the future, we do” – there were those who almost doubted whether the Kate who had acted was not a mechanical clone that replaced, as in a franchise, the original.
It was even doubted, once in the Village, whether the beautiful singer-songwriter Crystal Murray looming above the music stage was not actually an optical illusion and responded to the preferences of each viewer. It is the effect of advanced information combined with drinks and non-stop dancing… the lucidity of the interlude made in Sónar.
