How AI Figure Human

Xiayang Zhou
3 min readOct 25, 2020

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A 2014 science fiction psychological thriller film called Ex Machina,describe a robot who born with human consciousness: Ava, she is far more self-aware and deceptive than her creator imagined. At last, she killed two humans and escaped from the lab to the real-world.

It is a typically dystopian film. However, it can not help us to think about will AI(artificial intelligence) evolve consciousness, start to fight for their rights, destroy anything we have. It could be possible if we can certain AI could have the same personality what humanity shares. Social scholar worry that we will create a West World (1973 American science-fiction Western thriller film) in the future and AI would be the backfire. Before talking about the end of the world, let us look at serval examples of the current AI on the earth.

BabyX

BabyX is the first developmental prototype of Soul Machines to explore how human is interact with machines and the way to create a digital consciousness. Mark Sagar, CEO of Soul Machines, introduced a future with emotionally artificial intelligent. He thinks Baby X is an experiment of future vital assistant which could learn our emotion and behaviour and interact with us in real-time. There is a digital brain inside of BabyX, which share the same structure of the human brain. Each part has its own ability to help her to sense, learn, adapt and communicate. By massive research of body languages and physiological structure, the computer could simulate an 18 months baby both inside and outside. Another interesting thing is BabyX paint the pictures based on what she experiences like a real human baby.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHQhCiVLRpE

Sophia

Sophia is the world’s first robot citizen developed by Hanson Robotics. She is well known as a guest on The Tonight Show with an incredible conversation with Jimmy, which shows how far that Artificial Intelligence going. Sophia could recognise she is not one of the humans and play a wealth of emotion. The differences between BabyX is Sophia have a physical body which combining top innovations in science, engineering and artistry. However, Sophia looks a bit of strange because of the Uncanny Valley(robots appear more humanlike, they become more appealing until it reaches a certain point). On the other hand, whatever how mang technologies Sophia applied: symbolic AI, neural networks, expert systems, machine learning, the real intelligence is scientists behind Sophia. The developers will design and guide Sophia’s language system.

What is consciousness?

Before talking about consciousness, Let us know a very famous physical guess: Schrödinger’s cat, a cat in a box is half dead and half alive. The simultaneous state of being both alive and dead is called a “superposition”.

However, when we open the box and pick a look, the simultaneous state becomes certain, at that moment, the consciousness born. Roger Penrose, one of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics Laureates, believes that AI can not generate consciousness, even if the computer could neural signal. He also thinks the consciousness will inside of Black Hole where the time and space are operating differently.

So, back our question, how AI figure human, or we can say, how human figure human.

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Xiayang Zhou
Xiayang Zhou

Written by Xiayang Zhou

Master student of MFA Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London

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