What makes us human?
Is it empathy? Is it embodiment? Is it an ability to appreciate the existence of one another?
The model that you see above, was not created by anyone by hand. It’s created entirely by a machine learning model. But it looks like a human, moves like a human. The methods we trained learned to understand what a human is, and generate humans doing different things. It keeps learning and getting better at its understanding of humans as we keep training it with more data about us.
Will we be able to train it to have empathy?
Will we be able to train it to understand and appreciate the world?
Yes, I believe we will.
Classic Star Trek portrayed a future that is built on optimism. A lot of people like to say that kind of future can never happen, the only possibility is a dystopian world. I strongly disagree.
I think our future with AI will be what we make it.
So I want us to make it the Star Trek future. They have embodied AI agents that can interact and behave like real people in virtual spaces and in the real world. But that’s not the hard part any more. The embodied AI agents in this world also have an understanding of human intentions, good and bad. They’re built with an understanding of the world, the people in it, our emotions, and an appreciation of everything around them. The technologies we create will embody our own values.
That said, we do not have to be naive about the implications of AI. Everything that can be digitized, will be. And it will be used to train AIs. But you’ll find people everywhere who strive to not just build these models, but to keep ahead of how they could be misused. We have the tools to build the safeguards. We have the people committed to it. People who want to create a better future. People who don’t back down and will keep trying new ways to do things right.
A future built on AI is an absolute. The only variable is the people who will build it. And to build new innovations that are used for good, we’ll need people with optimism to build them.
Whatever it means to be human, doesn’t have to end with us.
