Great Telegraph article and an even better series on the rise of the robots. Catch it on BBC iplayer this weekend if you get a chance.
We hear two opposing points of view, much like real life. On the one hand, we have the biologist Dr Ben Garrod who is really unnerved by robot evolution. On the other hand, we hear from a very passionate electronics engineer Professor Danielle George, who welcomes them with open arms.
Those pesky robots, eh? This week, Facebook shut down a pair of its artificial intelligence chatbots after they invented their own language and started talking to each other in a way only they understood. Eat your heart out, Stanley Kubrick. This was like a sinister plot twist in a dystopian vision of the future. If the tinny tykes aren’t hell-bent on universal domination (see Doctor Who’s Cybermen), they’re becoming scarily sentient (witness Humans or Westworld). Hyper Evolution: Rise of the Robots (BBC Four) was a timely two-part documentary investigating how far robots have come and what it could mean if, like in those sci-fi series, machines developed true consciousness and emotional intelligence.
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