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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and writes Futurepolis, a newsletter on the future of democracy
Would a Superintelligent AI Choose a Human Form?
Imagine you’re a machine superintelligence that wants a body to move around in. Would you choose a human form?
A Kludge Rather than an Optimal Design
Biologists have no settled theory on how our bipedalism evolved, but — like everything else in biology — it’s a kludge rather than an optimal design. Moving and balancing on two limbs is an impressive engineering feat, but it is dicey on rough terrain and puts terrible pressure on a spine first evolved for quadrupeds. If we hadn’t started from four limbs, might not a centaur-like shape be better?
Humanoid Robots
Yet in the tech sector, the humanoid robot is the cultural handmaiden to another holy grail: artificial general intelligence. This week, Meta was reported to be following Tesla, Apple, and Nvidia in planning a big investment into AI-powered humanoid robots. Their initial focus will be household chores.
The Limitations of Humanoid Robots
Companies like Figure AI and Agility Robotics are already building electronic bipeds for warehousing tasks like moving goods around. But outside of quite specific applications, there’s really not much need for these machines. It’s no accident that humanoid robots and AGI are the fever dreams of nerds raised on science fiction (I say this as one of them). Both assume that the human form, whether physical or mental, is the pinnacle of evolution.
The Human Mind: A “General” Intelligence?
The human mind, however, far from being a “general” intelligence, evolved for the very specific job of operating a human body, which itself is the outcome of evolutionary compromises. Simple computers can outperform us at any number of brute-force tasks. Even our powers of abstract reasoning are constrained. Just try visualizing a nine-dimensional mathematical object or synthesizing the arguments of 100 philosophy books at once. AI can already do a better job.
The Importance of Tactile Sensitivity
And yet, we are extraordinary in other ways. Think of simple but delicate tasks like washing a wine glass, changing a nappy or placing a flower in an arrangement. Now imagine doing them with your eyes closed. Notice how little the task depends on seeing and how much relies on your skin’s astonishingly fine-grained sensitivity as well as your ability to measure tension, pressure, and weight through the muscles of your fingers, hands, and arms. Embedding a tactile sensorium in every cubic millimeter of the body is an engineering challenge orders of magnitude more difficult than vision, itself still not a fully solved problem in robotics.
Conclusion
Just as there is a “jagged frontier” in AI, where systems that excel at one task can be abysmal at a closely related one, a robot’s capabilities will probably be wildly inconsistent. Flower arranging might be possible — after all, the worst that can happen is a crushed flower — but reliable nappy changing and elder care might be forever out of reach. In short, expect robots to remain specialized.
FAQs
Q: Why limit a superintelligent AI to a human form?
A: A superintelligent AI almost certainly wouldn’t pick one body design to carry its mind around in. Why limit computational capacity to what fits inside a single skull? Or constrain mobility to what a certain set of limbs can do?
Q: What is the future of humanoid robots?
A: Expect robots to remain specialized, with varying degrees of success in different areas, but not quite reaching the versatility of humans.
Q: Can AI outperform humans in all tasks?
A: Yes, in many areas, but not in tasks that require fine-grained tactile sensitivity and adaptability to complex situations.
