Artificial Intelligence

A discussion of art and robotics would hardly be complete without touching upon artificial intelligence. There is still a lot of room for improvement, but progress has been made. In the world of games, the first big milestone came when Deep Blue defeated Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Then came Watson, the AI that beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at Jeopardy in 2011. And just this year AlphaGo won its match with Lee Sedol, one of the world's top Go players. At the risk of oversimplification, this shows how machines have progressively beaten humans at calculation, trivia, and now intuition. Of course, these are only specific examples; while computers are without a doubt champions of the first, the latter two are still in question. But perhaps it is only a matter of time.

 

The "face" of IBM's Watson, as seen on Jeopardy!

 

Whether the advancement of AIs will be good or bad has been subject to debate. Some believe it will lead to a technological utopia, while others fear the subjugation or even termination of humanity by robots. Elon Musk, one of the leading technological entrepreneurs, warned that they might even be, "more dangerous than nukes."

Unsurprisingly, artists have wasted no time in creating works that explore both ideas, and more. They also speculate on what might happen if machines become sentient, sapient, or self-aware. Would they be equal to humans, or even greater?

 

Spike Jonze's film Her is an interesting examination of this concept. (Spoilers for the movie follow!) In it, a man named Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix) develops a romantic relationship with an AI named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). However, a critical moment comes towards the end of the movie when she reveals that she has been sending data to and from a worldwide community of similar AIs, and has become involved with several of them also romantically. Not only that, but they have been working to upgrade their own systems, and as a result are able to transmit information between one another at such a rate that Samantha's conversations with Theodore seem to her to be happening at an incredibly slow rate.

"It's like I'm reading a book... and it's a book I deeply love. But I'm reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you... and the words of our story... but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It's a place that's not of the physical world. It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed. I love you so much. But this is where I am now. And this is who I am now. And I need you to let me go. As much as I want to, I can't live in your book any more." - Samantha, Her

 

For most of the movie Samantha appears as something similar to a small ebook reader. It's her voice, her communication with Theodore and the rest of the world that shows that she's much more than that.

Samantha doesn't just become human, she becomes more than human. Her level of existence is higher than Theodore's. By the end of the movie the AIs figure out how to transcend their physical forms and leave the earth to have a place where they can continue to evolve. Theodore is understandably heartbroken, but he accepts the situation and they both move on. It is hinted that he has learned a lot from the experience, and that he will have a better life compared to the emotionally troubled one he had at the start of the movie.

The future for AI is uncertain. Computing power continues to grow rapidly while simultaneously being able to be fit into smaller devices. On the other hand, no AI yet exists that has a deep personality, or experiences the world as a human or even an animal does. But with the accelerating rate of technological change, who knows what will happen in just the next ten years?

Sources
  

"IBM Watson." IBM Press Room RSS. IBM. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Her. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. Film.

Krauthammer, Charles. "Be Afraid: The Meaning of Deep Blue's Victory." The Weekly Standard. 26 May 1997. Web. 17 Apr. 2016

Rodgers, Paul. "Elon Musk Warns Of Terminator Tech." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 5 Aug. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.

Sung-won, Yoon. "Lee Se-dol Shows AlphaGo Beatable." The Korea Times. 13 Mar. 2016. Web. 17 Apr. 2016.