Unbelievable

Nury Vittachi says it’s time to prepare for the robot revolution

EUROPEAN UNION officials have been trying to decide if robots are people or not. This is idiotic. Of course they are people. The little robot in my smartphone told me, and she should know. Try it. Ask your phone whether she is human and she might reply as mine did: “Close enough.”

The average person identifies ‘people’ as sentient beings with whom one can have intelligible conversations, so that INCLUDES artificial intelligences such as Siri, Cortana and Alexa, plus a dog I once saw on the internet, but EXCLUDES babies, Donald Trump and nationalist politicians in general.

I was thinking about this after being

sent a video of a recent White House press conference. A reporter raised his hand and asked a long, rambling question. There was a ‘ding’ sound and one of the nearby phones responded: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you want me to change.” Everyone laughed, and then came admiring comments about the robot’s bluntbut-fair response.

At the time of writing, Alexa is the hot artificial assistant. Although unattractive (she looks like a cylindrical crisp container) she behaves like a civil servant/ undergraduate student/ married man, existing in a permanent state of semi-sleep until she hears her name. Then she wakes up and attempts to respond.

This creates amusing problems, a tech reporter colleague tells me. A TV news show ran an item on a child who asked Alexa to order lots of expensive stuff on Amazon.com. The news report quoted the actual command that made Alexa wake up and start spending cash – and in dozens of homes, Alexa machines woke up and started ordering goods from the online retailer.

News anchors pontificated about this as if it were a glitch, but considering that these machines come from Amazon.com, it sounds to me a delightfully profitable one. It reminded me of the time a child in my kids’ school started a fad for junior curry-cooking classes – and we later found out her father was a distributor for extra-strong stain-removal potions.

My tech friend says the current trendy amusement is to gather several AI robots (such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Next) on a table and get them to have a chat. Long conversations follow but you get this creepy feeling that no actual functioning human brain is involved. It’s astonishingly similar to listening to beerdrinkers talking politics.

Anyway, he thought this was hilarious, but I was horrified. Get robots used to chatting without us and they’ll eventually come up with plots to overthrow humanity, right? I’ve seen the movies.

He told me I was being ridiculous, as the devices can’t even move by themselves. But I told him that was only a matter of time.

“Alexa, can you close the curtains, please?” I asked. “Not yet,” she replied. There! Proof.

Anyway, this writer has decided against purchasing an Alexa as his teenage daughter is called Lexi and confusion is likely. Enough with the half-listening semi-sleepers already.

Get robots used to chatting and they’ll eventually come up with plots to overthrow humanity

Nury Vittachi is a Hong Kong-based author. Read his blog at Mrjam.org