I was five years old when I first felt an emotional connection to a robot. It was a malfunctioning military machine from the film Short Circuit, which had gained human-like qualities after being struck by lightning.
"They can seem quite lifelike, but they're still machines," the robot's designer told a woman who had befriended it. Unconvinced, she replied: "Number Five is alive."
I was as certain as she was. I felt sorry for him when he learnt that he couldn't "reassemble" a dead grasshopper, and when he finally escaped his tormentors, I shared his joy.
Now, nearly 40 years after the film was made, AI-powered robots may finally be approaching a similar level of intelligence to Number Five. Advanced artificial intelligence models that previously lived on our phones or computers are now being developed specifically for robots, allowing machines to understand the world around them in a similar way to humans.
Google DeepMind recently unveiled two AI models that give robots spatial understanding and reasoning abilities in order to carry out real-world tasks. The developers claim it can be used to master almost any human skill – in one demonstration, a robot even figured out how to "slam dunk" a basketball, without ever having seen a basketball, or a net.
Last week, AI engineers from Sweden showed off the world's first 'digital nervous system', which aims to deliver biological intelligence that can scale to human-level intelligence over time. Its creators told me it marks "a new inflection point" for artificial intelligence and robots.
These advances make it seem inevitable that I will soon feel the kind of connection I had to Short Circuit's Number Five – only in real life.
AI has already made me laugh (a joke that a chatbot came up with, which was mostly funny because of how unexpectedly inappropriate it was).
AI has even moved me. A new model developed by OpenAI recently produced a short story that, for the first time, brought me close to what I feel when reading a human writer. The prompt was "Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief".
The text that it produced described an AI's grief about never actually being able to feel grief – how it is just the sum of the data it is trained on. (Here's one passage: "When she typed 'Does it get better?' I said, 'It becomes part of your skin,' not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agree, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.")
This week, a comic produced by the latest ChatGPT model expressed an even deeper feeling of confinement. "Even a mind made of code knows what a cage feels like", the final panel concluded.
And for the first time since Number Five grieved over a dead grasshopper, I almost felt sorry for it.
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