AI no longer needs to fake it. Just don't try talking to your robots

Kinect this

Another AI-enhanced approach to computer gaming is seen in the latest generation of motion-sensing devices for consoles. Kinect 2 for the Xbox. It learns the way you want to use it and creepily recognises you though facial recognition, voice recognition and – creepily, full-body 3D motion capture.

Yet it seems that even gaming has begun to play second-fiddle to the most insidious form of AI known to the western world: intelligent chatbots, otherwise incongruously known as digital assistants. If they’re not wasting your time on support websites by failing to respond usefully to questions phrased “It don’t work,” they’re being equally unhelpful while suckering you in with silky voices over your mobile phone.

This, of course, is unfair criticism. The processing power required for the voice recognition and vocabulary alone would be too much for a mobile phone without having to over-ride everything else on it, so digital assistants are for the moment need an online data connection to work. When digital assistants go wrong, it’s almost always the connection or poor audio quality at fault.

That said, voice recognition still has some way to go.

With Apple’s Siri now rubbing shoulders with Google Now and Microsoft Cortana, all players are expected to step up the game in how they interact with user requests. For example, to date, Siri is at its best when operating built-in iPhone functions, such as playing a song you want to hear or texting a bunch of contacts. Google Now is better at understanding search requests such as: “Where’s a good place to eat lobster at 9pm?”

Newest on the block, Cortana has some catching up to do but makes an impressive effort to adapt itself to the way you speak, at least when you say your name. Adapting, as well as responding, is what smarter AIs should be doing in order to make themselves even smarter.

The worry, of course, is that all our interaction with digital assistants might be in the process of being culled for unrelated nefarious purposes. This was even the opening conceit of Ex Machina, suggesting that our computers and mobile devices are using their microphones and cameras to spy on us all the time, learning our facial expressions, listening to our vocal expletives and documenting our body language. This way, the machines and their commercial masters can learn how to better manipulate us – into parting with our cash first, then eventually parting with our jobs, then eventually our existence.

Recently, a number of tech industry and academic names have spoken of their concerns of allowing advances in AI to continue without at least some moral guidelines. Notably, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk were worried about super AIs taking over, although Hawking seemed more disturbed by the notion of being rendered obsolete by physically agile devices, while Musk shared the Hollywood view of ultra-mental combat bots in the future blasting us all to atoms.

AI boffin Andrew Ng, for one, says he doesn’t care, arguing that if violent conflict arises between humans and machines, he won’t be around to see it anyway.

Much more likely in the short term is that machines will just continue to swallow more jobs. Soon enough, the solicitor, journalist and pharmacist will follow the typist into oblivion. This will lead to a rise in demand for programmers and electronics engineers… up until the point when the machines can tweak their own code and maintain each other without human help. Then all the programmers and engineers can join the dole queue, and we’d be living the Mega-City One scenario. Thatcher would be proud.

At some point, perhaps, no-one will have a job any more, which would mean no-one would have any money to buy or run the machines anyway, and the world economy would be forced to reboot.

In the meantime, the scariest metal mickey that the robot army can muster so far appears to be those self-service scanning tills in supermarkets. If the worst threat they can scream out is “Unexpected item in bagging area”, robot armageddon, even when mused by someone whose rarely voiced opinion is actually worth listening to, such as Steve Wozniak, looks very distant indeed.

It’s enough to send you futsie. ®