Throughout our discussion of the future of AI and the uncanny valley, one of the ideas brought up in class was the thought that someday you may not be able to distinguish an android walking down the street from a human walking down the street. The idea personally terrifies me, but when I look at the examples of the current androids, I'm not unsettled by them and can easily see that they are inhuman. It took me some time to figure out what makes the androids seem so fake and unrealistic, but I think it comes down to two factors: the eyes and the voice.
They say the eyes are the window to the soul. I never really thought about the truth to that saying, but as I wondered why the robots shown in class just seemed so fake to me and why the aforementioned concept seemed impossible, I realized that it's because of the eyes. When you look into the eyes of another human being or an animal, you can see so much; you can see the emotions, the thought-processes, the life of said creature. It's something impossible to explain, but I think everyone can relate. With that being said, when I look into the eyes of the robots or androids shown in class, I see an emptiness. I don't see life or emotions or personality.
Another issue with the possibility of robots is their voice. Human voices can hold so much meaning due to inflections and tones. The voices of AI like Siri or Alexa or similar artificially intelligent things lack these qualities. I think this is one of the unsettling things about the Black Mirror episode we watched: the "fake" Ash had the inflections in its voice like real human have, and it made him more unsettling to me because if I had no prior knowledge that he was an android, I probably would've been fooled by it (which terrifies me). Obviously, the reason for Ash having inflections and tones in his voice is because he wasn't robotic and was actually being played by a human, but the point still stands.
If AI voices had the same qualities as human voices and if AI eyes weren't so lifeless, the possibility of walking down the street and not being sure whether you were looking at a human or an android is much more plausible (and terrifying) to me. Currently, I think modern AI lacks the qualities that make a human a human.
3 comments:
Same here, that's why I'm not really concerned about the robots looking similar to humans because they don't appear humanlike to me in the first place either lol
I also believe that you can distinguish a human from a robot through their body movements. Robots move a little stiff. I agree with the differentiation of the eyes within the robots cause you can’t actually see the emotions in a robot eye. I like your deep thinking upon the physical features between a human and robot . With your statement being said I can be aware of that “creepy” creature just by looking at its features
I agree that it’ll be easier to see robots as not humans. And being able to detect body language is something humans are good at, and I think we’d notice something about robots. I don’t ever think we could get robotic movements perfectly in coordination like a human.
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