I got suckered into watching “The Robot Will See You Now” during Channel 4’s November week of robot programmes. Shoddy though it was, it conveyed more of the truth than the more technically correct offerings. Its premise: a family of hand-picked reality TV stereotypes being given access to robot Jess, complete with a “cute” flat glass face that looked like a thermostat display, and they consulted he/she/it about their relationship problems and other worries.
Channel 4 admitted Jess operates “with some human assistance”, which could well have meant somebody sitting in the next room speaking into a microphone, but Jess was immediately recognisable to me as ELIZA in a smart new plastic shell.
ELIZA, for those too young to know, was one of the first AI natural language programs, written in 1964 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT – and 16 years later by me while learning Lisp. It imitated a psychiatrist by taking a user’s questions and turning them around into what looked like intelligent further questions, while having no actual understanding of meaning. Jess did something similar in a more up-to-date vernacular.
Both Jess and ELIZA work because they give their patients somebody neutral to unload upon, someone non-threatening and non-judgemental. Someone unlike their friends and family. Jess’s clearly waterproof plastic carapace encouraged them to spill the beans. Neither robot doctor needs understand the problem being shared, merely to act as a mirror in which patients talks themselves into solving it.
Interacting with Jess was more about emotion than about AI, which points up the blind alley that AI is currently backing itself into. I’ve written here several times before about the way we confuse *emotions* with *feelings*: the former are chemical and neural warning signals generated deep within our brains’ limbic system, while feelings are our conscious experience of the effects of these signals on our bodies, as when fear speeds our pulse, clarifies vision, makes us sweat.
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source http://news.statii.co.uk/why-ai-needs-more-human-intelligence-if-its-to-succeed/
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