I, Human

Léonie Watson

I, Human

BCS Insights, London June 2019

Léonie Watson

3rd Century BCE: Argonautica

Talos towering over figures on a beach
Apollonius Rhodius' Talos

8 CE: Metamorphoses

Oil painting representing Pygmalion reaching for his statue
Ovid's Pygmalion

1872: Erewhon

Erewhon first edition cover
Samuel Butler's Erewhon

1950: I, Robot

Isaac Asimov headshot
Isaac Asimov
I, Robot First Edition Cover
I, Robot

2058: Handbook of Robotics (56th Edition)

The Three Laws are the only way in which rational human beings can deal with robots - or anything else. But when I say that, I always remember (sadly) that human beings are not always rational!

Human intelligence

Seeing

Optical illusion checkerboard

Hearing

Speaking

Thinking

Seeing

The process of analysing and understanding images

Hearing

The process of identifying speech and translating it into text

Speaking

The process of translating text into synthetic speech

Thinking

The process of identifying, analysing, understanding, and responding to data

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm

1976: Simulating sight in real-time

2011: Computer vision applications

1980s: Moravec's paradox

High-level reasoning requires little computation, but low-level sensory processing requires enormous computational resources
Code reflected in eye

A chair

Wooden Chair

And another

Camping Chair

And one more

Rotating Chair

2006: Cloud computing

Google cloud platform
Eric Schmidt

2016: Facebook image recognition

Facebook status image
One person in a room close up

2017: Microsoft SeeingAI

2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

1993: Apple voice recognition

2016: Google's Deep Mind translation

2013: Kinetic Sign Language translation

1961: Daisy Bell

2014: Amazon Echo

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

2013: IBM Watson learns to swear

IBM Watson
IBM Watson
Urban Dictionary
Urban Dictionary

2016: Microsoft's Tay.AI learns bad behaviour

Microsoft
Microsoft
Tay.AI
Tay.AI
Racism
Racism

2017: Google Translate has gender bias

Google
Google
Sexism
Gender Bias

AI amplifies human ingenuity