UN Tech Company Rolls Out Human-Wanting Robots for Questions at a Geneva Information Convention

BERLIN (AP) — A United Nations expertise company assembled a bunch of robots that bodily resembled people at a information convention Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an occasion meant to spark dialogue about the future of artificial intelligence.

The 9 robots have been seated and posed upright together with a few of the individuals who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva convention heart for what the U.N.’s International Telecommunication Union billed because the world’s first information convention that includes humanoid social robots.

Amongst them: Sophia, the primary robotic innovation ambassador for the U.N. Improvement Program, or UNDP; Grace, described as a well being care robotic; and Desdemona, a rock star robotic. Two, Geminoid and Nadine, resembled their makers.

Organizers stated the occasion on the AI for Good International Summit was meant to showcase the capabilities, but additionally the constraints, of robotics and the way these applied sciences may assist the U.N.’s sustainable improvement targets. The media occasion featured introductions from the robots’ companions or creators, and a spherical of inquiries to the robots from reporters.

And whereas the robots vocalized robust statements — that robots may very well be extra environment friendly leaders than people, however wouldn’t take anybody’s job away or stage a rise up — organizers did not specify to what extent the solutions have been scripted or programmed by individuals.

The summit was meant to showcase “human-machine collaboration,” and a few of the robots are able to producing preprogrammed responses, based on their documentation. The UNDP’s Sophia, for instance, generally depends on responses scripted by a workforce of writers at Hanson Robotics, the corporate’s web site reveals.

Reporters have been requested to talk slowly and clearly when addressing the robots, and have been knowledgeable that point lags in responses can be due to the web connection and never the robots themselves. That didn’t stop awkward pauses, audio issues and a few stilted or inconsistent replies.

Widespread tech merchandise resembling Apple’s Siri have been utilizing speech recognition expertise to answer comparatively easy human queries for greater than a decade. However final yr’s launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot with a powerful command of the semantics and syntax of human language, has triggered worldwide debate in regards to the fast development of AI programs.

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