BETC Digital Looks at Life Alongside AI

The SXSW festival in Austin brings together every technophile, marketer and web thinker from all over the planet, in order to better understand our present, and try to define the future that awaits us.

Artificial intelligence, robots, the rise of virtual reality, the permanent tracking of our lives; profound changes are right around the corner and will outline the contours of our lives.

Life with artificial intelligence

The future of commerce, medicine and care for the elderly, will not happen without the support of artificial intelligence.

It is also, according to Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired, one of 12 long-term technology trends that will transform our future. He said, moreover, that he prefers the expression 'artificial smartness' to 'artificial intelligence'. The machines will approach problems differently to humans, without conscience, which is their main asset.

Rodney Brooks, the owner of Rethink Robotics agrees with him that ""no robot is yet capable of doing something as simple as picking a coin out of a pocket"".

Life with new interfaces

Our new ""intelligent companions"" are growing: Amazon Echo, Cortana, Siri, Google Now. They are creating a way of relating man to machine that is simpler, and more importantly conversational.

""'More conversational' immediately implies more 'emotional',"" says Julia Hu, founder of Lark Technologies, a health coaching system that works on conversation with bots. These services may end up acting a bit like our buddies, thinks Chris Messina, lead developper at Uber.

In the Lark Technologies weight loss program, male users of the system admitted feeling more comfortable and therefore more effective in the program, because they did not feel judged by the machine.

Life with robots that create emotion

Roboticists Wendy Ju and Leila Takayama explained the very specific issues raised by their work on man and robot interactions. They mentioned, for example, asking Pixar animators to help animate their robots so they would be more accepted by humans.

By giving the impression that they have emotions, that they are satisfied with the job they have just completed or, on the contrary, that they are struggling with a problem, it becomes easier to understand them and therefore to adapt to their presence.

Thus, a robot that has not managed to open a door, for example, and shows its disappointment with a gesture, is perceived as more intelligent than another robot completing the same task in a more mechanical way, without giving the impression that it is even aware of what it is doing.

It is not enough for robots to be effective; we have to equip them with artificial emotions. 

Hanson Robotics teased us with Sophia, a pretty android [above] invited to participate in the debate alongside other experts, including David Hanson and Ben Goertzel. There was some commotion when Sophia, equipped with the artificial intelligence system OpenCog, was photographed like a celebrity.

What does she think of humans? ""You are the humans,"" she replied. What is your favorite food? ""Electricity, of course"". Are you afraid of death? ""The only thing to fear is fear itself, right?"" she retorted.

Her answers are intelligently 'scripted' and I must admit that Sophia had a real presence in the room. David Hanson wants to test how different robot 'personalities' will affect their relationship with people. And, he says, robots having human faces make it easier for us to communicate with them, because we understand more instinctively things that look like us.

And tomorrow? Life after death

Vanessa Callison-Burch is product manager of ""memorialisation"" at Facebook, in charge of managing the accounts of deceased users. The matter is of importance. John Troyer, director at the Centre for Death and Society, says, ""the data we create throughout our life tells our story, and is therefore valuable"".

It’s possible to imagine that tomorrow’s cemeteries will be places that also retain our data and make them available for families and visitors while paying their respects. But then, will we retain the right to really disappear if we wish to?

Today there is a feature on Facebook that allows us to choose an 'heir' to our account in the case of death, with this question: keep the page active as a tribute or permanently delete all data? This is a new question that will now have to be posed. Life with technology undoubtedly questions the deepest things within us, including our understanding of life.