The boundaries between the real world and the digital world continue to break down, and their importance in our personal and professional lives continues to grow. Some describe the fusion of virtual and real worlds as part of the fourth industrial revolution. The full impact of this revolution on us as individuals, our companies, society and the community remains unknown.
Greg Cross, chief business officer of the new Zealand company to develop artificial intelligence Machines Soul, sectet that one of the inevitable consequences of the collapsing of these boundaries is that people are spending more and more time interacting with technology. During a presentation at the Global Summit Sungularity University in San Francisco last month, the Cross has shown the last work of the Soul Machines and shared his views on the current state of AI on a human and where this technology may take us in the near future.
The humanized games technology
First Cross, presented Rachel, one of the “emotionally responsive digital people” Soul Machines. The company has built 15 different digital people of different genders, groups and races. Rachel, together with their “sisters” and “brothers” has a virtual nervous system based on neural networks and biological models of the different tracks of the human brain. The virtual system is controlled by neurotransmitters and hormones according to the type of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin that affect learning and behavior.
As a result, each person can have their own unique set of “feelings” and responses to interaction. People can communicate with them using visual and audio sensors, and the car will react in real time.
“Over the last 20 or 30 years has changed our way of thinking about machines and our interaction with them,” says Cross. “But we always believed that they should be more humanlike”.
The realism of the graphical representations of digital people provided by another co-founder of Soul Machines, Dr. Mark Sager to have received two academic awards for his work on the computer in several movies, including “Avatar” by James Cameron.
Cross noted, for example, that instead of having to be flawless and clean skin, Rachel is a freckle and birthmarks like a real human skin.
Another brain-computer threshold
When people interact face-to-face, emotional, and intellectual participation strongly influences this interaction. How will look the cars involved in the dialogue emotionally and intellectually, and how this kind of dialogue will affect our feelings and relationships with AI?
Cross and his colleagues believe that the humanized artificial intelligence will make the technology more useful to humanity and encourage people to use AI more and more useful ways.
“We believe that it is very important to promote the fact that machines can be more useful to us. They can be useful for us. They can be more interesting for us, if there are more like us,” says Cross.
This approach seems to be shared by other companies and organizations. For example, in the UK Bank NatWest is testing a Bark — a digital assistant that helps answer user queries. In Germany, Daimler Financial Group plans to use Sara as a personal Concierge for their clients. According to Cross, Daimler is looking for other ways to deploy digital people in the organization, from digital sales and, in the future, digital drivers.
Latest creation Soul Machines is a will, a digital teacher who can communicate with children via a desktop, tablet or mobile device, helping them to learn new things about renewable energy. Cross considers other social applications for digital people, including potential work as doctors in rural communities.
Our digital friends and brothers
Not only Soul Machines trying to humanize technology. In this area there are many technology companies, including Amazon. Amazon is working on a home robot that, according to Bloomberg, “has become something like a mobile Alexa”.
The search for more humane forms of technology seems particularly common in Japan. Not only when it comes to the various robots, but also virtual assistants, like Gatebox.
The Japanese approach is perhaps best summarized by the famous androids developed by Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro: “the Human brain is configured for recognition and interaction with people. Thus, it makes sense to focus on the development of the body to the mind AI as well as AI. I believe that the ultimate goal for Japanese and other companies and scientists to create an interaction type of man.”
During the presentation of the Cross of Rob nail, CEO Singularity University, invited Rachel to become the first fully digital University lecturer. Rachel agreed, and although she’s the only digital teacher, she predicted it wouldn’t last.
“In 10 years you will be a digital version of yourself, like me, to solve a specific task, and it will make life a lot easier,” she says. “This is great news for me. I will have a million digital friends”.
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What do we get if we make machines “more human”?
Ilya Hel