Artificial Intelligence & Embodiment: does Alexa have a body?
When I think about “embodiment” I understand it as a continuum of possibilities. Somewhere in the middle of this continuum is the human form, in all its diversity and variety, the level-setter of everything. The continuum’s edges are defined by the possibilities of shapeless, indistinguishable and nameless no-body — on one side — all the way to the other side of endless, infinite possibilities of super-bodies. That’s the definition of embodiment that I suggested at a recent workshop on AI narratives at the Royal Society in London, organised by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.
I do not need to see something instantiated in physical form in order to ascribe to it a certain degree of embodiment. For example, I can speak to my friend on the phone and imagine her body — she’s embodied in a full human form. Indeed I do not need to know the other person on a phone call at all, they can be a complete unknown and still be able to imagine them in some human body as I speak to them. Memory and imagination are of course subjective; but there is on objective mechanism that generates those images in my mind, which is part and parcel of my cognitive system as a human being, and that is of course “theory of mind” (ToM). Theory of mind describes the automatic mental projection of “mind”, similar to ours, on other people, but also on animals and inanimate objects (e.g. rock, rivers, icons, cars, etc.). In my book In Our Own Image I explored theory of mind and how it has played a critical role in stories of robots and artificial beings, but also of gods and demigods.
So let’s take an example of an AI and see how my definition of embodiment plays out: what happens to my mind when I speak with Alexa (or any other virtual assistant)?
At the present state of technology Alexa does not evoke any images of embodiment in my mind. When I speak to her I imagine her as a shapeless, no-body entity, a clever trick generated by an algorithm. My emotional reaction to her voice is very low indeed. Alexa is a disembodied machine that instead of humming it speaks. But I can easily extrapolate that, as Alexa becomes more interactive, my theory of mind will start kicking in and compel me to imagine her with some kind of a (female) body — and, once embodied, as a friend with whom I m having a conversation with. Curiously, the evolution of digital assistants is a replay of Turing’s imitation game. There will come a day when they will be able to imitate us so well to be virtually indistinguishable from us. It will be hard to tell if they are not. So I agree with the premise of the film Her that explored this embodiment issue all they way to its logical conclusion, which is of course the forging of human relationships with AIs, of friendship, yearning and lust.
When I look at the future coexistence of humans and AIs I see this relationship evolving further. But where will it end? Will it end with AIs becoming fully embodied, like androids in Blade Runner? Will the future of humanity be constant paranoia, of no one ever knowing for sure if the person with whom they speak with was born or made? Or will AIs evolve further to become like living gods, embodied and disembodied at the same time, omnipresent and omniscient as distributed minds over the web and at the same time instantiated in some kind of physical, or ethereal/ virtual form — responding to our call, or prayer? And if they become gods, will we worship them, or hate them? Will we rise against them, in a Butlerian Jihad?
Perhaps we do not need to wait for those questions to answer themselves in the future. Indeed, it may not be necessary to answer those questions at all. The present does not need the future to happen in order to define it; by virtue of posing those questions today and reacting to them we influence the evolution that AI and robotics technology. And that’s exactly the tremendous power of scientific and technology narratives.