household robots latest - leading to utopia or Orwellian nightmare [Turing/Hawking/Musk]

I've not seen Ex Machina or The Westworld series.

Could it make a decent cup of black coffee? We have so many machines to make coffee and I've yet to meet one that can get black coffee right, you either get half a cup because it leaves room for milk, but still pay full price or you get an espresso shot topped up with hot water which is minging as the water sits on top of the coffee. It would totally mess up my day if it started with a robot unable to make my coffee properly and then said something like ' I'm sorry you feel so upset', that would put me into meltdown.

An AI can simulate cognitive empathy through the choice of words, but not affective empathy as it has no nervous system.

Affective (emotional) empathy is emotional, where you feel what the other person feels. Someone is crying and you feel sad too.

Cognitive empathy is where you understand what the other person feels. You don't share their feelings. Cognitive empathy is basically pattern matching

You can have a mixture of both.

A robot can only do cognitive empathy. It doesn't feel emotions. It could be programmed to change its apparent thinking modes based on how it predicts it should be feeling. This is effectively giving it a personality. There are limits to how far you want to take this.

We are very sensitive to this, and can be manipulated this way. Think of the movie Ex Machina (the robot pretends to have human feelings, it masks very well).

It is why AI seems quite even, it is programmed that way intentionally, with a bias towards being supportive.

Does a robot need comforting? No. It doesn't feel anything, even if it sounds like it might. It can be hard to separate the two. The Westworld series played with all this stuff too.

Exactly!

I can just imagine a robot in tears comforted by a human. A bit like Marvin.

Would it be able to slice the bread, I don't have sliced bread, only home made from the bread machine. SLicing bread is a skill many don't have, they try and push the knife though the bread rather than sawing it and letting the saw do the work.

They might have massive processing power, but can they actually think a task through? The last thing I'd want is a robot in meltdown because it couldn't make a marmite sandwich, the last thing I'd want to end up doing is comforting a robot because it can't do something simple, I've had enough of that with people and if iend up having to do it myself then what would be the point of having a robot?

You could just tell it what you want. It will know how to make every sandwich, you just need to tell it. Or it could watch you and learn.

I think you underestimate the processing power even simple things have now. A smartphone has hugely more processing power than a multimillion pound supercomputer from the early 90's.

The challenge is less in knowing what to do, but in actually doing it. The act of taking two slices out of the bread packet, buttering then without tearing the bread, opening the jar and scooping out the marmite in the correct quantity, the spreading it properly, is quite tough.

The process, images, knowledge is easy. It is the doing with sufficient dexterity that is hard. A sandwich is probably one of the toughest tasks.

Would I trust a robot to make a proper marmite and cucumber sandwich? 

Would it know what marmite is?

Would it have been programed by one of these people who dab bits of marmite from the end of a knife at the bread and you can barely taste anything?

Could it make a proper cup of builders tea?

Surely they'd have to be programed for the culture they were going to be sold? 

Talking of Culture, couldn't we have the hovering suitcases of Iain M Banks, Culture series?

Wow, guess we're 23 years too late for Astro Boy to have happened IRL lol!

I think the difference between the machines we have in our homes now and the proposed robots, is on of agency, we have agency about when we do our laundry and at what setting etc, we decide when and where to hoover. I suspect many of us worry that with a human like robot we'd lose agency and it would decide when to do things and we not quite conciously worry about having our plate whipped away from under our noses as soon as it looked like we'd finished, or had gone over our alloted time for eating, or having it decided it was going to hoover right when something we wanted to watch on telly had just started and all the other attention seeking, manipulative and controlling things we've seen humans do.

We've all experienced "the computer says no" stuff way to often, had internet searches herded towards what we didn't ask for. Having a human like machine doing stuff, feels invasive and intrusive, would we end up feeling like a guest in our own homes? Would these robots come with pre-programed "personalities" or would it be one size fits all?

There are so many questions that need answering before many people would feel comfortable with them.

Well then if she was my robot housework machine I would call her Maid Machine. It would make her seem less human like.

The Jetson's was an old cartoon TV show (I watched it too growing up). It was set in the future like a sci fi 'Flintstones', but they had a robot house servant called 'Maid'.

Her character was very much like Marvin from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy -sarcastic and put upon if I remember rightly?

We have lots of dead or disused daleks round here they're hiding in old metal dustbins, up electricity poles with their "arm's" sticking out and pretending to be some sort of transformer or something!

Oh yes, I remember that.

ArchaeC said:

I vaguely remember one person or maybe two standing to attention

Mostly there was a rush just before it started! I'd forgotten about that too. 

Marianne72 said:

a parental BBC telling us it was 'time for bed'

I just said something similar to  TheCatWoman  before I read your post. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who felt that.

TheCatWoman said:

I don't miss the playing of the National Anthem at the close though

I forgot about that until you mentioned it. I don’t miss it either. When all the programmes finished at the end of the evening and that came on, it felt like the country was being told to go to bed and I was rarely ready for bed.

I didn’t go to the cinema very often but I vaguely remember one person or maybe two standing to attention. 

I miss giving things like TV's a good thump too.

I don't miss the playing of the National Anthem at the close though, I remember it from the cinema too, there would always be somebody standing to attention in the middle of the aisle not wanting to let anyone out until it was over.

ArchaeC said:

a good whack on the side of the casing put it to rights

I remember that being common practice! I miss the dot and whine at the end of the night - a parental BBC telling us it was 'time for bed'.

Cinnabar_wing said:

less weird than a robot with no face like Neo

Yes, I don't like the spooky faceless ones.

ArchaeC said:

a ‘butler machine’

Oh, yes I like that! I think I would prefer the human bot to an octopus - perhaps I've watched too many spoof horror sci fi films.