My encounter with a smart robot: Cute but scary

And when I typed a paragraph (“Hi! I am from Thailand. I am a reporter for Nation TV!”) on the computer for him to speak out loud, he delivered it with great accuracy and vigour.

My immediate plan, I told the Japanese professor overseeing the research and development of the next Smart Robot, was to produce the first generation of world-class news-reading robots for TV. He (the professor, not the robot) smiled and replied: “That can be done. All we need is the right kind of software.”

My new robot friend is called Nao (pronounced Now). His much-publicised debut was in April when Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, the largest bank in Japan, introduced him as a teller at its downtown Tokyo branch in the hope that the multilingual robot would help foreign customers during the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Manufactured by French robot-maker Aldebaran Robotics, Nao was introduced at FUT as a programmable 58-centimetre-tall humanoid equipped with multiple sensors. It currently speaks Japanese, Chinese and English but will eventually speak 19 languages if the programming goes to plan.

The French robot-maker is a subsidiary of the Japanese telecom and Internet giant Softbank, so it came as no surprise that the launch was in Tokyo rather than Paris.

My conversation with the Japanese robotics professor came the same day that Japan announced preparations to speed up its development of robots to secure a lead over rival countries, including the US and Germany, in launching the world’s “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has made clear his policy for a “robot revolution” to counter the country’s shrinking workforce and boost economic growth. Among the several Japanese companies with plans to invest in “non-human resources” is Nestle Japan, which has announced a project to employ “Pepper”, another Aldebaran-SoftBank “emotional” robot, to sell its coffee machines at up to 1,000 outlets by the end of this year.

SoftBank’s chief executive Masayoshi Son described the move as a “baby step in our dream to make a robot that can understand a person’s feelings and then autonomously take action”.

Operators of the Huis Ten Bosch theme park in Nagasaki say that its two-storey Henn na Hotel will be run almost entirely by robots, from its porters to room cleaners and front-desk staff, when it opens this summer. Guests will be given the option of using facial-recognition technology to open the door to their room instead of a key. About 10 human employees will work alongside their robotic colleagues at the futuristic hotel. In other words, humans will serve as “assistants” to the robots, not the other way round.

Should we be celebrating this new chapter in human history? Or should we be really scared?

World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and SpaceX leading light Elon Musk are among those concerned at the possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) might evolve to the point that humans could not control it. Hawking went so far as to suggest that this could “spell the end of the human race”.

 “Computers will overtake humans with AI within the next 100 years,” he told the Zeitgeist conference in London recently. “When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.”

Elon Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Motors and co-founder of SpaceX, has said that research into AI poses a definite threat to humanity:

“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that … with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

Not all tech experts and scientists are as concerned about the dangers of AI, of course. They point out that the brains behind robotics are still a long way from creating a machine smart enough to cast aside its human operators.

In other words, AI will take over the world only if humans let that happen. The paradox, of course, is that scientists are determined to make robots smarter and stronger through advanced technology – and in the process could build the kind of “demon” that might destroy its own creators.

I asked the Japanese professor at FUT whether he thought robots could take over the world one day. He answered, quite calmly: “The possibility is there, especially when robots with AI can reach a certain level of self-learning.”

In other words, a post-human future is a real possibility if humans stop learning and robots are equipped with sufficient artificial intelligence to learn to think and do things on their own.