AI development should not be left in the hands of mega-companies like Facebook and Google, warns Ine Gevers, curator of an exhibition in Eindhoven that examined the importance of emotion in the relationship between humans and robots.
Gevers ? one of the Netherlands' most radical curators ? said it was "unethical" that the vast majority of data processing and development for artificial intelligence (AI) was being done by big companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and through a relationship with devices like smartphones that are designed to be addictive.
"The companies that in the end can develop better robots are the ones that have this data, that have this AI ? the Googles, the Amazons, the Facebooks ? and that needs to change," Gevers told Dezeen. "It's unethical because it's not an honest trade. The way we, for instance, engage with our smartphones is completely addictive. You could compare it to smoking," said the curator of Robot Love.
Curated by Ine Gevers, Robot Love included InMoov by Gael Langevin
Gevers said that the current media attitude to robots and AI in the West was "unreal" and populist, and that humans needed to think more about how we could welcome robots into our lives and learn from them instead of simply exploiting them.
The human instinct to anthropomorphise ? attribute human characteristics to objects and animals ? can make us feel empathy towards robots and we needed to teach them a similar process to p...