The Steven Spielberg-produced sci-fi drama Extant imagines a world where human-level artifical intelligence is on the cusp of reality -- or perhaps has already evolved, with terrifying implications. Wired.co.uk speaks with Murray Shanahan, Professor of Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College London, and Nicole Carey, who works in Humanoid Robot Research and Development at Engineered Arts, about the biggest developments in real-world AI and just how scared we should be of a robot uprising. "I think one of the things that has impressed me most in robotics and AI recently has been self-driving cars," says Shanahan. "It's actually a pretty mature technology now -- Google has had cars driving around completely autonomously in California, with barely any accidents."

Shanahan is correct -- to date, the only major incidents involving a driverless car have been the fault of us flawed, fleshbags. In 2010, Google engineers said a vehicle was rear-ended at a traffic light, and in 2011, one had a minor fender bender while being manually driven by human. Considering the US has the sixth-highest number of traffic related deaths in the world (the UK sits at a considerably less-lethal 65th when both are counted by total numbers killed), perhaps a little less autonomy could be good. "I think we're going to gradually start to see those things on our streets over the next five to ten years, starting in California and then spreading out throughout the developed world -- no doubt making a lot of taxi drivers pissed off. And I feel sorry for the taxi drivers, I should say, it's not great from their point of view." And cabbies thought Uber was a problem.


Although Carey -- who helped develop Craig, the "RoboThespian" used to help promote Extant in the UK -- says the reduced power consumption is "a huge step towards wider use of robots and the development of more intelligent and adaptable robot behaviours," it's the development of AI personalities that is key to their evolution. "Over the last year we're starting to see a lot more research on what we call 'social hardware' -- robotic and ambient devices with strong 'EQ', or emotional intelligence," Carey says. "Face recognition, expression recognition, vocal analysis and biomimetic hardware can all combine to create machines that can better understand people. Emotionally appropriate responsiveness, fed by interpretation of multimodal communication layers, is more vital in human-robot interactions than literal understanding of speech or textual input."

Carey also points out that one of the "biggest and most obvious developments is Google's acquisition of eight robotics companies at the end of 2013".

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She continues, "not necessarily because of what it means in the long term, which is for now purely speculative, but because in the short term it led to such an explosion of public and investor interest in robotics."

The more nuanced level of communication between humans and AI that Carey highlights is also one of Shanahan's picks for key developments. "I'm very impressed with improvements in Apple's Siri and Google Now," he says. "These products that use voice recognition as the basis of personal assistants have been gradually getting better, and you don't notice they've been getting better because they're constantly improving. I find that both recognise almost all of my speech, which is an amazing achievement because just a few years ago, even the best speech recognition systems were pretty crap! Especially if they were meant to work with a variety of different speakers."


Shanahan also highlights IBM's success in the American game show

Jeopardy as a turning point for the advancement of robots understanding complicated human speech. The show makes it even more complicated by having players give their answers in the form of a question -- "this feathered barnyard animal is known for crossing the road" would be answered "what is a chicken?", for instance. "It's just turning the syntax around, a bit like crossword clues in a way -- they can be kind of cryptic or involve puns, all kinds of things. And it requires a huge amount of general knowledge," the professor says. "[But] they produced an IBM Watson, which played the game and managed to beat the reigning champion. A very impressive piece of technology."

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Extant's main AI character -- so far -- is Ethan Woods (eight year-old Pierce Gagnon), the robotic child of astronaut Molly (Halle Berry) and her engineer husband John (Goran Visnjic). Raised from "birth" as a normal child, the Woods aim to teach him human morals as any organic child would. It's an approach that Carey and Shanahan both think is likely to be mirrored in real robotics going forward. "Developing an AI from a 'child' state is a nod to emergent behaviour and self-learning," says Carey. "It is unlikely that true AI can be instigated in a 'top-down' manner, though not impossible.


A more intuitively appealing approach is allowing behaviour and complexity to arise organically from a structure which may have high organisational complexity, but is governed by simple fundamental rules. iCub and CB2 are examples of "childish" robots that learn by themselves, which may be the eventual precursor to something like Ethan." "The writers have convincingly made it seem that Ethan is currently learning a repertoire of emotional behaviours," Shanahan adds. "At one point we see him practising facial expressions in front of a mirror. Perhaps, over time, he will develop real feelings of empathy for humans [or he might] only ever imitate such feelings. In raising these questions, Extant confronts us with difficult philosophical questions about the possibilities of artificial intelligence technology, possibilities that are a way off today but that might become real in the next few decades."

The moral implication of creating what amounts to sentient virtual life is a tricky subject. If an artificial intelligence can develop real emotional responses to stimuli, can or should they be extended rights? How much of an ethical obligation do we owe robots?

"I don't have any sort of philosophical objection to the idea that we might be able to build artificial intelligence in the future that is capable of suffering and therefore deserving of rights," offers Shanahan. "But I think there's different ways that we might build or achieve human level AI. If we take a very biologically inspired routes to achieving it, we build things that are very brain-like, then it's more likely that they will deserve to be attributed emotions and the capacity for suffering." "On the other hand, if we engineer these things from scratch, using a very different kind of technology, then ethics become very hard to say," he continues. "I think there's every chance we can create something that has the appearance of having emotions and feelings but doesn't really. It'll be a very difficult and challenging exercise to untangle all that, philosophically, legally, and so on."

The opposite situation is also a concern though -- how robots and artificial intelligences may react to humans. "People have been thinking a lot about whether, if we do build human level AI, you could then get a sort of super-intelligence -- that the AI could improve itself very rapidly," Shanahan suggests. "If you build it in a certain way you might lose control of it.

[Even] with perfectly benign purposes in mind, it might be very difficult to predict how it's going to achieve its goals. If it's really smart, just as a side effect, it might try to achieve its goals in ways that are very destructive, ways that might try to take resources from humans, for example."


It might sound a touch far-fetched, but some kind of "robot apocalypse" as a result of rogue AI is a potential outcome worth considering. "The Terminator film always comes up in this situation, and it's a bit annoying!" Shanahan says. "There are certain scenarios with a science fiction feel that I think are worth taking seriously -- robots achieving world peace by destroying all humans is a very good example. It might be a rhetorical example but it is one where the robot or AI is simply doing what it was programmed to do, but nobody had worked out what the ramifications were of asking it to do that."

Clearly, we're doomed.

Extant is streamed in the UK on Amazon Instant Video, with new episodes each Thursday at 9pm.