The Face of AI

I came face-to-face with AI this weekend. Well, actually face to ear if I am to be exact. My grandmother is one of the new faces of AI. Her hearing aid is AI empowered to provide better amplification and noise filtering. 

Thanks to books and movies, our traditional image of AI ranges from humanoid to a sliding puck sucking up dust from our floors. Of course, there are the ever vigilant coffee top cylinders that listen for our requests for music or paper towels. But for some reason, we want AI to resemble us most of all. 

The interesting thing about AI, however, is it is not limited to any specific form. In fact, if you consider the cloud as its native state, AI is formless. A stream of algorithms spread across multiple servers connected to a myriad of data sources, both hardware and software. 

When I was in industrial design school a few decades ago, I had a professor, Dr. Michael Pause, who banned me from the machine shop one semester. He said I was limiting my designs to what I could build, not what I could dream. I should be forcing new tools and processes to be created as a result of my designs instead of the other way around. I think that is where we are with AI and robotics today. There are a few outliers, but in most cases we are confining our creativity to a narrow perception of what robots should be instead of what they can be.

The same goes for human augmentation. We have finally reached the point where we can replace a damaged or missing limb with an artificial one. In some cases the new limb is more stylish or capable than the real one it replaced. In the end, though, the replacement is just that - a replacement. Now, imagine if we deliberately made the new limb better than the original. It could be fireproof. It could be stronger. It could be like a tentacle. It could have interchangeable attachments. It might not look or function like the original at all. Once the possibility is acknowledged, a whole spectrum of capabilities can be imagined.

As humans, we look for characteristics that conform us to look the same, function the same, be the same. That's why during our rebellious phases many of us try to find ways to be unique. Purple hair, body piercing, tattoos, etc. For most, that is as far as they go. Occasionally someone will go out on a limb and do something drastic and embed an IoT device or deliberately disfigure their bodies. Our cobots are in the same boat (just not rebellious yet). We are conforming them to be humanistic to their own detriment. Why should a cobot have to walk (a rather limiting feature) or have arms that pivot with the same restrictions as human arms? 

Humanity is at a turning point. Social acceptance is undergoing immense pressures for all categories of diversity and inclusion. We need to recognize the question facing us is more than race, gender, and color. The question now is will we truly accept those who are different if those differences make them more capable, more intelligent, more powerful than the rest of us?