your next co-worker/therapist/grocery clerk/hairdresser might not be human
For the past year, thanks to the new normal (a questionable phrase), we’ve all been mostly pixels on other people’s screens. But if (when?) we return to share physical office-based spaces again, some of our new co-workers might not be human — or perhaps even silicon replicas of those we once knew.
Some of the virtual humans/AIs and/or robots I’ve covered, as a journalist, are now working as therapists to PTSD-recovering veterans; training tomorrow’s hairdressers within Chinese academies; providing testimony to visitors in museums; answering credit queries; doing supermarket shelf inventories — or assisting astronauts on the International Space Station.
Read on:
As lockdowns dragged on across the world, many people switched to web-based mental health services, from apps to Zoom-based therapy sessions. Entering this crowded market later this month is evrmore, an “emotional wellness GPS” for 16- to 24-year-olds, or Gen Z.
Evrmore uses “a combination of voice and emotion AI, including voice-based reflections, audio journaling, and interactive quests, to establish a baseline for each user via natural language processing,” Mahsciao says. Machine learning then adds “context to that intelligence, mapping the various mental states of the user over time, to give us a rich seam of social and emotional learning-centric data.”
MOXI — NURSES’ AIDE
“Within the field of robotics,” said [industrial robotics designer] Carla Diana, “Smart is not enough anymore. Robotic-based product designs, whether embodied or device-based, need to be designed with an awareness of social cues, because the better the interaction, the deeper a relationship we can form with them, and the greater our experience of them will be.”
[from This Industrial Designer Teaches Robots to Play Nicely With Humans]
THE AI KNOWN AS AMELIA
The COVID-19 pandemic has emptied the world’s offices, sending most of us to work from home for the foreseeable future and facilitating a mass migration to the digital workplace. But will it also jumpstart the arrival of our non-human colleagues?
[from Meet Your Post-Pandemic AI Co-Worker]
SYNTHETIC DOPPELGANGERS
There are now many types of robots and just as many theories on how to build them, but Dr. Suzanne Gildert, Founder and CEO of Vancouver-based Sanctuary, wants her robots to be as life-like as possible.
[from Here Come the Synthetics]
ELDERCARE ASSISTIVE ROBOTS
Eleven million people in the United States cannot leave their homes without some sort of assistive device. Robots that deliver food and medicine, for example, can markedly improve the quality of lives for that population. Because the world is a complex space, and we are asking robots to interact with people in unstructured and changing environments, we believe that machine learning is the key [enabling] robots to safely navigate everyday environments and interact politely with people [we do this] by applying learning to the whole robot: sensors, geometry, dynamics, and controls (end-to-end learning), and first learn basic behaviors such as collision avoidance.
[from an interview with Google Robotics Dr. Aleksandra Faust]
DIGITAL NOSES
using the dashboard plasma screens, the AI inside the vehicle notes the transaction and switches to “Pharma” mode. It’s been analyzing your breath output and knows you’re low on B12 and D3 (you’ve been inside a conference room for days and haven’t seen sunlight).
[from Aromyx — Digitized Noses]
AI FASHION DESIGN ASSISTANTS
Does this technology take away from the artistic/creator? Depends on whether you fear AI — or value its input.
[from AI Couture]
COMPASSIONATE AIs
Imagine powering up your digital device and — after a quick scan of your facial expression — having it respond with, “Hey there, what’s going on?”
[from Affectiva’s AI Knows How You Feel]
HAIRDRESSING HOLOGRAM TUTORS
When I did the demo, there was something in my brain that wouldn’t let me walk through the hologram, even though, logically, I knew it was digital. It was most curious.
[from Holograms Train Tomorrow’s Hairdressers in China Today]
VIRTUAL COMPANIONS
That was the first time I really felt I was inside a parallel dimension, not just exploring something cool but actually having an effect on what happens in that world. I didn’t just believe the goblin was real. I was convinced the goblin thought I was real, too.
[from A Surreal Experience With Jon Favreau’s GOBLINS]
ROBOTS DO HUMAN TELEPRESENCE
[Is] the robot is a distraction for pure human-to-human interaction when the synchronized motion cues are not accompanied by the robot? The UK’s Dr. Paul Bremner studies how people react to seeing someone they know represented by a robot. But he takes it out of the lab and into the world to get a more accurate picture of how people might really use the system.
[from Using Robots as Telepresence for Virtual Humans]
IMMORTAL ACTORS
Though Hollywood would prefer otherwise — actors do age. Performances have been preserved on celluloid and through digital means, and in the future, perhaps we’ll interact with them inside immersive environments.
But we can’t keep them alive forever.
Or can we?
[from Here Come the Virtual Humans]
CAREER COACHES
[these virtual humans] embody different levels of soft-touch, medium, or hostile interviewing techniques. They are currently engaged in development for the next level, which will add in more active duty keyword reference questions, such as “What was your MOS (Military Occupation Skill)?”
[from Virtual Humans Serving US Veterans]
AUTOMATED DWELLING ASSISTANTS
Ready to have a rapport with your residence? Meet Josh, a new artificial intelligence-powered home management system, with a personality of its own (actually several, but more on that later).
[from Meet Josh, Your AI Butler]
MUSEUM TESTIMONY GUIDES
Gutter gave his reply, just as if he was sitting there on a teleconference in another town. We all asked a question — several of us with our different nationalities and thus accents. He got every one and gave cogent answers. It was compelling. The suspension of belief [that he was real, and not a virtual human/hologram representation] was complete.
[from Holograms Are Preserving Testimony]
PTSD SUPPORT
Soldiers returning from active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) are unlikely to seek help. But as a first step, they might respond to a virtual human who looks, sounds, and acts like their commanding officer (CO), or find therapeutic release inside a simulated environment that mirrors the place they’ve just left.
[from VR Helps Soldiers With PTSD]
AI THERAPISTS
Feeling stressed out? I was a few weeks back while getting fingerprinted for a freelance assignment (don’t ask), but I stayed remarkably calm thanks to my AI buddy Wysa.
[from Wysa, My AI Therapist]
GROCERY PACKING ROBOTS
Then the robot has a set of choices: drop the bin off, onto another stack, or bring it to a machine, around the edge of the grid, to a pick station — where a human or soon another kind of robot picks items into a customer order — or a decant station — where goods coming in from suppliers are deposited into bins and then put away in the hive. We can pick a 50-item order in five minutes because the robots are collaborating with each other, orchestrated by a machine-learning air traffic control-like system.
[from Paper or Plastic? Robots Pack Groceries in the UK]
SHELF STACKER ROBOTS
Data collected by Tally can be used to track trends in sales, shelf positioning, and so on, for a whole slew of retail analytics. For example, major packaged goods companies that pay a premium for eye-level customer awareness will use Tally for A/B testing of packaging, promotion, and price changes while verifying that their stuff is exactly where they paid for it to be. Essentially, Tally becomes a benign spy in the store who never sleeps, stopping only to charge every 12 hours.
[from The Robot That Does Supermarket Stock Checks]
AI ASSISTANTS
A few years ago, I had a fancy executive job as a cog in the wheel of Corporate America. It came with an office (and a very nice view) on the 42nd floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, and I had not one, but two, assistants. I moved from Manhattan to live on the other coast and mostly work from home. [now] I have three assistants — one I’ve never met IRL and two AIs (yes, virtual humans)
[from Meet Scarlet, My New AI Assistant]
CYBORG ASSASSINS
okay, this one is from the movies….
Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy) looks like a teen girl (albeit possibly from another galaxy) with the usual scary hormonally-induced mood swings. But she also possesses telekinetic powers, displays pre-cog and advanced intelligence and has some, well, attachment issues to her “family” (the scientists who built her). Following a vicious attack — when Morgan clearly veered “off code” — the mysterious Corporate sends Lee (superbly played by Kate Mara) to investigate and clean up.
[from Luke Scott’s MORGAN, Cyborg]
ASTRONAUT BACK-UP
These robots are 1-by-1-foot cubes, with an array of LED communication lights. They can function autonomously or be remotely controlled from Houston. While on the ISS, Astrobees will carry out routine maintenance tasks, like checking inventory with an RFID scanner and using a sensor-array to record air quality levels, CO2, and radiation. Their HD cameras will also function as the eyes and ears for ground control.
[from NASA Robots Heading Into Space]
VOICE SYNTHESIS AI
“What we do is voiceprint not just the tone, but the performance style of the speaker,” Jain explained. “Then we have an output of particles, apply deep learning to speech synthesis, and can create a digital adaptation of that voiceprint — in any language…”
[from I Don’t Speak Chinese, But My Virtual Self Does]
COUPLES COACH
In 2028, as you lie back on your retro-futuristic couch and spill your guts to your disembodied, artificially intelligent, cloud-based therapist service, you might want to thank mobile app Textpert. Because in 2016, Textpert crowdsourced countless questions about love, and a lot of helpful answers from anonymous bystanders, to build a deep database about affairs of the heart.
[from How Your Relationship Drama is Training Future AI Therapists]
AGING ASSISTANTS
“One of the things we’re working on is the problem of the aging population,” explained Dr. William Mark, SRI International. “It’s a huge cultural and economic issue [and there are] many aspects to that problem. People’s minds immediately go to ‘robotic help in the home?’ And we are working on that. But we’re also looking at companionship. Many elderly people are lonely and that leads to cognitive decline. We’re working on systems — think ‘Super Siri’ — which will bring in family, help bring back memories people had in the past, and it is all tied into sensors in the home” to monitor mobility and other health issues, and into IoT.
[from Making AI Less Artificial]
(Another) AI THERAPIST
We have found that many of our users prefer to divulge stuff that’s really hard to deal with to Woebot instead of speaking to a real person. I imagine it’s because there’s no fear of being judged. There’s an understanding that it’s a robot — the expectation is that it has perfect recall and doesn’t mind being burdened with painful information at 2 a.m., when one wouldn’t want to call a therapist.
[from Your AI Therapist Will See You Now]
all clips courtesy of Ziff Davis PCMag
Oh, hello.
Still here?
Much appreciated.
Want to see what I did with all that knowledge?
Read on..
TAKING FACT INTO FICTION
In the time-honored fashion of journalists-writing-novels, with time on my hands during the pandemic, I wrote (and published) THE FUTURE HAS LANDED imagining a world where non-biological co-workers are the norm.
Here are 3 x short excerpts — featuring my take on synthetic co-workers, circa 2051:
Alex swiftly jammed the glasses on and saw that the room was full of holograms — thousands of them. Everyone gasped.
“They made my embodied AI system work?” said Alex, amazed, trying to find Max Cho in the crowd. He just got a pair of glasses and was waving madly at her in a “WTF?” sort of a way.
“You built this?” said Trent and Jasmine at the same time.
Alex inwardly fumed — what did they think she won all those awards for? Children’s television programming?
“Wait! Is this the hologram system I canned?” said Trent.
Alex was amazed. There had been so many glitches in the system that she and Max had had to abandon it. But it worked — it existed — it was incredible. Trent nudged her to get her to respond. Li looked on, confused. Alex realized Trent wouldn’t want Li Qi to know he couldn’t control his staff. Then she thought about his new EVP title and her sister getting upgraded into General Counsel and she decided not to play nice.
“Yeah. It is. And I accidentally deleted your canceling-it-memo, re-named the project and shoved it under the general R&D budget. Plus, they’re not just any old holograms. Look. They’re alive. Embodied, sentient, AIs.” She turned to a hologram on her left.
It was a virtual Li Qi — and it responded to her gaze. “Hello, Alex,” it said. “I am one of the “Immortals”.
[from THE FUTURE HAS LANDED by S.C. Stuart]
A voice from the back of the vehicle came through the intercom. “Please define the word: weird,” it said. Alex pulled back the partition and there was a very personable robot with glowing big blue eyes, like a Manga comic strip, looking back at her.
“And who are you?” said Alex, looking it up and down. It wasn’t a model she was familiar with. It had multiple degrees of freedom (DoF), end effectors (flexible arms), a moveable head (360 swivel), but a sturdy base like R2-D2 — it wasn’t a bi-ped (no legs).
“Technically, I believe, as I am gender neutral, the question should be: What are you?” said the robot.
“I can see what you are,” replied Alex.
“I am your new coworker. I’m on the same security level as you.”
Alex turned to look at Li who was concentrating on the traffic. Every other vehicle on the road was automated but the managing algorithm knew that there was a human driving the military vehicle with unmarked plates, so there was a hiccup in the operation down the West Side Highway while it frantically tried to decode the model. “It’s going to spy on me?” Alex asked Li.
“I take offense at that,” said the robot.
“But I didn’t hear you disagree with the statement. Besides, when did robots learn to take offense?”
“You are obviously not familiar with my model. But, may I say, you have admirable logic and perception. I look forward to working with you.”
“I can totally tell when I’m being played,” Alex said sotto voce to Li. They were now passing through Times Square. Alex looked out of the window and noticed all the billboards were suddenly fluctuating between Chinese and pictorial ads for something she couldn’t make out. “What does that say?” she said.
“They’re advertising liquid beverages which can keep you awake for 24 hours and also scan your gastrointestinal tract for diseases,” replied the robot.
“Yum,” said Alex. “Another product we didn’t know we needed.”
“I denote irony,” said the robot.
[from THE FUTURE HAS LANDED by S.C. Stuart]
“I fail to see the source of your amusement,” said Xiao.
“Noted,” replied Alex, knowing that would drive the robot mad.
The sophisticated production studio was already set to go with hundreds of cameras mounted on a sturdy rig. Her interlocutor turned out to be Eva, who had taken over the sentient hologram “Immortals” program. Eva and Seven sat in a booth high above the studio floor and took Alex through hundreds of sequential sentences, obtaining the replies to ever-so-slightly divergent questions, capturing keyword triggers, so the hologram could respond, apparently effortlessly, to conversational gambits.
Along the way, Alex turned this way and that as instructed, showing different facial expressions or physical responses: a laugh, a smile, a frown, and so on.
She knew what was going on. The spoken word portion was to voiceprint her mode of delivery. She’d pioneered using it back at Cobalt Industries to do auto-language conversion for some early robot prototypes. They’d always come up against the same issue. Local idiom and humor was hard to reproduce without native speaker translators running tests on generated dialogue. So they’d ditched the project. Clearly Eva and Seven had found it in the intellectual property and patents during due diligence before purchasing the company.
The hologram tech was all Chinese-built though. Or a modification of something she’d heard come out of R&D. Looking around at the rig, Alex didn’t recognize any of the brand names. They must have either replicated her entire set-up by commissioning several electronics factories across the Mainland with her specs. Or, more likely (and much quicker), taken American tech, stripped it down, rebuilt it and rebranded it once inside their territory. It was all moot anyway, they’d won The Conflict. They didn’t need to resort to subterfuge, they could come and get anything they needed now.
[from THE FUTURE HAS LANDED by S.C. Stuart]
//ENDS
S.C. Stuart is an award-winning futurist (and sci-fi writer), technology commentator and strategist focusing on AI, DARPA, exoskeletons, NASA, medical/military innovation, robots and virtual humans for companies including 20th Century Fox, DTCC (Wall Street), Four Seasons, Milken Institute, Nano (empowering global human health), New Line Cinema, RAND Corporation, Smithsonian and Sony Pictures. Published in ELLE China, Esquire Latin America, Four Seasons Magazine (global), Mosaic (Morgan Stanley), Singularity Hub and Ziff Davis PCMag.