If you’ve seen I, Robot then what you’re about to read will terrify you.
The world’s most advanced robot started ‘misbehaving’ while her creator was being interviewed on the UK breakfast news show This Morning, and people have found it disturbing.
The humanoid, named Ameca, visited the studio with one of her creators, Morgan Roe, of Engineered Arts in Cornwall, England, back in 2023.
Roe explained that it took a team of 35 people to create the robot – which many give it she/her pronouns, although Roe explained he calls Ameca an ‘it’, because of the fact it is a robot.
Speaking about it on the show, he said: “Well, we’ve created Ameca to be that human to robot interactive, a robot basically. It’s not a robot that can walk around, not yet. It’s mainly about the the human robot interaction, so we’ve really worked hard on the expression and the gesturing.
“That’s the hardware side of things, but then you’ve got the software side of things that’s the AI, we’ve seen recently chat GPT – it’s big in the news, it’s exploded, so it’s amazing that that’s happened recently, because we can take that technology and integrate it into Ameca.”
Ameca winks at the camera as the interviewers talk about the dangers of AI (ITV)
He went on to explain how Ameca is able to learn just through conversations like humans do. Roe said: “With the AI you can inject extra information into it, so we inject what Ameca is so Ameca knows that it’s a robot it’s gray and it knows its name – we’ve also told it today that it’s on This Morning.
Finally, the interviewer Holly Willoughby asked the question we all want to know: “Is it going to take over the world one day?”
Roe replied: “It won’t take over the world one day because we can turn it off – you’ve got an ‘on/off’ button.”
To which Willoughby joked: “Well that’s good, don’t lose that remote control.”
Okay, that’s what its creator replied, but Ameca is the best person to ask – co-presenter Phillip Schofield asked the humanoid: “Ameca, do you plan to take over the world?”
It replied: “No of course not my purpose in life is to help humans as much as I can I would never want to take over the world, that’s
not what I was built for.”
Fortunately Ameca doesn’t have the use of her legs! (ITV)
But while Roe, Willoughby, and Schofield were discussing the dangers of AI, Ameca began misbehaving – in the form of a wink and tapping its nose, as if it knew something.
It was all quite unnerving.
Commenting on the video, uploaded to YouTube, one person wrote: “When they were talking about the risks of AI, Ameca winks in a way that it seems she has a plan.”
another wrote: “Now look at the robots response to what he said. That’s scary. And when the maker says AI is advancing too fast the robot winks 😳 like wtf lol.”
I’m not sure if Ameca has a plan, but I certainly don’t want to find out!