Twerking, Moonwalking AI Robots–They’re Now Here

In a study released last year, Kat­ja Grace at Oxford’s Future of Human­i­ty Insti­tute “sur­veyed the world’s lead­ing researchers in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence by ask­ing them when they think intel­li­gent machines will bet­ter humans in a wide range of tasks.” After inter­view­ing 1,634 experts, they found that they “believe there is a 50% chance of AI out­per­form­ing humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automat­ing all human jobs in 120 years.” That includes every­thing from dri­ving trucks, run­ning cash reg­is­ters, to per­form­ing surgery, and writ­ing New York Times best­sellers. These sober­ing pre­dic­tions have prompt­ed aca­d­e­mics, like North­east­ern Uni­ver­si­ty pres­i­dent Joseph Aoun, to write books along the lines of Robot-Proof: High­er Edu­ca­tion in the Age of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence which asks the ques­tion, How can uni­ver­si­ties “edu­cate the next gen­er­a­tion of col­lege stu­dents to invent, to cre­ate, and to discover—filling needs that even the most sophis­ti­cat­ed robot can­not”? It’s a good ques­tion. But a chal­leng­ing one too. Because it assumes we under­stand what robots can, and can­not, do. Case in point, Boston Dynam­ics released a video this week of its Spot­Mi­ni robot danc­ing to Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk.” It can moon­walk. It can twerk. Did the dance depart­ments see that com­ing? Doubt it.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Robots of Your Dystopi­an Future Are Already Here: Two Chill­ing Videos Dri­ve It All Home

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT