Don’t Ask Dumb Robots If AI Will Destroy Humanity

Intelligence will not pose a danger to humanity. The source of this reassuring news? A bunch of humanoid robot heads connected to simple chatbots.

The news stories sprang from a panel at a United Nations conference in Geneva called AI for Good, where several humanoids appeared alongside their creators. Reporters were invited to ask questions to the robots, which included Sophia, a machine made by Hanson Robotics that has gained notoriety for appearing on talk shows and even, bizarrely, gaining legal status as a person in Saudi Arabia.

This is an edition of WIRED’s Fast Forward newsletter, a weekly dispatch from the future by Will Knight, exploring AI advances and other technology set to change our lives.

The questions included whether AI would destroy humanity or steal jobs. Their replies were made possible by chatbot technology, somewhat similar to that which powers ChatGPT. But despite the well-known limitations of such bots, the robots’ replies were reported as if they were the meaningful opinions of autonomous, intelligent entities.

Why did this happen? Robots that can visually mimic human expressions trigger an emotional response in onlookers because we are so primed to

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