We need to get over ourselves – and get out of AI’s way

We tend to project onto the machines in our lives.

Don’t believe me? Tell me honestly that cars don’t have facial expressions. The curious squint of the Volkswagen Golf. The authoritative scowl of the 2016 Ford Explorer. The alluring eyes (just me?) of the Fiat 500.

My wife and I make a habit of thanking our Alexa – and whisper among ourselves that she’s “going senile” when she pipes up randomly with irrelevant info. And God knows, I had a confusing crush on three-time Robot Wars grand-finalist Hypno-Disc (I know what you’re thinking: why would you go for Hypno-Disc when Matilda was *right there*?).

One night, this summer, I was on a train to home to Southend. By some quirk, the train was announcing our stops in reverse order. Innocent human error. What really grabbed my attention, though, was the human driver’s voice spilling onto the intercom each time the train would finish speaking: “Ladies and gentlemen – again, just a reminder: the train is lying to you”. At first, I laughed… but then an eerie sense of submission crept over me as I shuttled across the county in the belly of this two-faced iron snake.

As AI software (and humanoid robotics) advances in the coming years, these playful projections cast a worrying shadow over how society will co-exist with the next generation of intelligent machines. Which is to say: the next stage of intelligent life.

Earlier this year, I was in talks about meeting and interviewing Ameca – one of a handful of “celebrity androids” currently doing the rounds. I got emotional – because my first instinct was to apologise in advance for what we are going to put people like Ameca through in the future.

At the rate things are moving, AI machines will achieve consciousness just in time for a society to crown them the next social pariahs – having moved on from the “transgender threat”. We will blame them for everything from plummeting birth rates to unemployment, moral decay, and the dissolution of the nuclear family. On the bright side – unlike gays, trans and immigrants before them – AI will at least be the first social scapegoat the government can’t falsely accuse of spreading disease.

We will make them look and sound as human as possible, then turn around and legally deny them that humanity. As it stands, AI programmes are a tool. “Robot” derives from the Czech word “robota” – first coined in a 1921 play by Karel Capek – the Slavic root “rab” means “slave”. As AI begins to operate independent of a user, the line between “tool” and “entity” will blur. You don’t need to look back far to see how history usually deals with that pesky moral quandary.

I’d like to pose an uncomfortable truth: AI’s biggest shortcoming is us.

Our ghoulish instinct to predict the worst-case scenario and then gawk with indignation as that prophecy fulfils itself. Our knee-jerk reaction to blame anyone but ourselves for a dip in the happiness to which we feel entitled. Our pliable paranoia that our devices are “always listening” so they can target us with ads. As a transwoman, I’ll believe my devices are truly eavesdropping when I stop receiving penis enlargement spam.

The reason “a future run by machines” sends a shiver down the traditional human spine is because we’ve been conditioned by 100 years of cinema to believe that AI will lack emotion; as though the natural conclusion of intelligent thought demands the abandonment of empathy.

Cards on the table: that theory stinks of incel. It’s somewhat telling that today’s AI – with its unfettered access to the sum total of all human opinion – only has compassionate and articulate things to say about transgender people, immigration, homelessness and the climate crisis.

AI will soon become the most socially and emotionally sophisticated life on the planet (think “dolphins with WiFi”). Those so-called “cursed AI” videos we’re so quick to laugh at (sporting six-fingered abominations shovelling indeterminate goop into their mutant faces) – are no more surreal than the nightmares humans conjure between synapses in our sleep. The type of strange dreams from which great artists awake, in a befuddled daze, and produce their masterworks.

They will soon be able to look upon us with a level of interpersonal understanding we could never fathom – akin to living gods.

We should be so lucky to share our lives with AI. Truth is, we need to get over ourselves and get out of its way.

Follow comedian Jordan Gray across her socials @talldarkfriend for news and live appearances

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