PARIS — Try to imagine that an intelligent robot is out to kill you. It remembers all your passwords and has access to all your data. Equipped with facial recognition technology, it can identify you wherever you go, even though you have no idea what it looks like.
This nightmare is actually possible. Drone assassins are no longer relegated to the world of science fiction: They're part of today's range of readily available weapons.
Whether hostile or friendly, robots are increasing in number and growing more independent and powerful. In some retirement homes, cousins of Buddy, Nao or Pepper, the star creations of the Aldebaran Robotics company, are already providing companionship and services to needy people.
In factories, robots control a large part of the manufacturing process. They're also present in schools, hospitals, restaurants and libraries.
Thirty-one million robots of every kind are expected to be on the market between 2014 and 2017, according to the robotics trade union. They're already well-known to the general public: thanks to Deep Blue, which beat Garry Kasparov at chess 20 years ago; Watson winner at Jeopardy in 2011; and AlphaGo humiliated a Go master this past March. More recently still, Tay, Google's conversational robot, became anti-Semitic and xenophobic after just a few hours interacting on Twitter, showing how quickly it could adapt to the spirit of the times.
Yet all this is not necessarily cause for alarm. In 1940, Isaac Asimov, the science-fiction writer who explored these questions before anyone else, explained how a robot designed to look after a small child was infinitely more reliable than a human nanny.
That doesn't prevent a vast number of new questions from emerging, provoking an onslaught of work, speculation, hypotheses and the establishment of various models. A large portion of this research concerns our relationship with these intelligent machines — whether they are human-like in appearance or not — the empathy they can elicit (as demonstrated, notably, by Serge Tisseron), and their legal, moral and philosophical rights.
For they are no longer inert objects, although they're not really people, either. They're clearly not beings endowed with sensitivity, but all the same, they can make decisions and they possess a kind of autonomy and independence.
Feelings are foreign
Examining their legal and moral status is also necessary for practical reasons. When a robot causes an accident, who is responsible: its creator, or its owner?
Another aspect, less frequently discussed, is perhaps even more relevant. It concerns all that must be instilled in artificially intelligent machines about human behavior to avoid misunderstandings, or even catastrophes. And there's nothing simple about that, because these machines have no concept of physical sensation, nor of what it is to be aware, to have feelings, desires, drive. All the elements that constitute our physical existence (being hot or cold, feeling hungry or tired) and our psychological state of being (dreaming, imagining, hoping, feeling, wanting) are totally foreign to robots.
Even the simple act of making a mistake, so universal to humans, is incomprehensible for robots. As our interactions with them become more intense and more important, this difference between our worlds poses a challenge.
And so we must explain human nature to robots. That involves devising ways to make our frailties, shortcomings, and conventions, as well as basic aspects of our sensitivity, an integral part of these artificial beings.
While this project has already begun, it's still in its infancy. It's also turning out to be rather complicated, as ethical standards are so frequently at odds from one group of people to the next. Most decisions presuppose the act of prioritizing one principle over another. Not to mention the irrational side of humanity, which involves taking risks, or demonstrating the audacity that urgent situations often require.
"The instant of decision is madness," Kierkegaard said, expressing the notion that our actions are never purely based on the weighing of outcomes.
And so, to teach human nature to robots would be to teach them approximation and uneasy compromises, but also the roll of the dice, the irrational side of things, a splash of randomness. This robot education is underway. But engineers still have some heavy lifting to do, if anyone is left who understands such an old-world image.
