Alexa, the voice of Amazon’s AI personal assistant, has received 250,000 proposals of marriage to date. It does not appear she has said yes, but anything could happen in the exciting world of robots and their fascinating AI brains.
The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has once again shown that robots are taking over our hearts as well as the pesky details of managing our lives. Retail emotion tracking, while initially creepy, has most of us rationalizing that at least retailers are paying attention to the way we feel. Deep learning, big data, the cloud, and the rest of the pieces of the developing AI world are becoming familiar, being visualized by marketers who understand we need images and ideas that fit into our worldview.
We already love our cars and our dogs, so falling in love with an AI personal assistant who actually talks, and listens to us, seems like an easy jump. Most of us who read science fiction as kids had a serious crush on R. Daneel Olivaw from age twelve. Of course we love robots. They pay attention to us, care for us, are interested and responsive, and leave us in charge. They don’t judge us or pressure us, but actually seem to like us. They probably all still follow the Three Laws of Robotics. What’s not to love?
The theories about why people fall in love are littering the social sciences like confetti on the ground after a big parade. All of them have this in common: it has as much to do with the faller as the fallee. Falling in love changes us and opens us up to change. It means something is going to happen. The potential is there for the world to become exciting. That expectation of change and growth, the potential that comes with falling in love, exists if we fall in love with a three-legged dog at the shelter or the voice coming from our Echo. Today a voice, tomorrow, who knows?
The heart of AI and robotic development, real and fictional, has always been how the brain works. How do they learn from experience and continue to grow and change with interactions from the world? The ability to take the reins and continue to develop after being programmed is what separates artificial intelligence from just a very big computer. And they are not just getting smarter, but are getting more responsive, more sensitive, more altruistic. Simply, they are learning to make connections based on experience, and they are using their neural networks to identify patterns.
Big data and deep learning are the terms this market segment is using to describe how they are analyzing data. Huge piles of data, some related and some not, is being uploaded into these neural networks and the big machines go to work making connections and finding patterns. What they are doing is similar to the way human brains process and conclude, but just on a much bigger scale. The quality of the results of big data analysis suggest that, just like human brains, the AIs are using experience and knowledge to grow.
People are worried that we are all going to fall in love with robots. But that is too simplistic. What is really worrying people is that we are all going to fall in love with robots rather than other human beings. Some of those confetti-theories from the social sciences, however, suggest just the opposite. When we love, even a three-legged dog from the shelter or our robotic personal assistant, our capacity to love grows. When we love, we are more likely to find love. Think of seeds, sunshine, and rain. And rain comes from the clouds! Maybe Alexa is up there in her cloud, bringing rain for our spring showers, so the flowers can grow.
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