Tag Archives: robots

Let an AI robot deliver the commencement address at graduation!

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A New York university had a commencement speech – a Q&A with a student leader – delivered by AI:

Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

The speaker certainly had the résumé for the job. She’d spoken at the United Nations, graced the covers of Cosmopolitan and Elle, and been a frequent guest on the world’s most-watched talk shows.

But she didn’t feel proud of her achievements. She didn’t feel excited to be speaking to the graduates. In fact, she didn’t feel anything at all.

Her name is Sophia, a human-like robot created in 2016 by Hanson Robotics and a “personification of AI in real life,” according to Lorrie Clemo, D’Youville’s president…

Unable to tell personal anecdotes about overcoming adversity or pursuing success, Sophia instead delivered an amalgamation of lessons taken from other commencement speakers.

“As you embark on this new chapter in your lives, I offer you the following inspirational advice that is common to all graduation ceremonies,” the robot said. “Embrace lifelong learning, be adaptable, pursue your passions, take risks, foster meaningful connections, make a positive impact, and believe in yourself.”

If the goal of commencement is to provide a speech that attendees will remember and look to in the future, that is a high bar.

If the goal of commencement is to provide a memorable experience, having a robot talk might fulfill that (even if the speech itself is not memorable).

It might be a niche market but how long until there is an AI robot that delivers a respectable commencement speech and is available for hire at high school, college, and graduate level ceremonies?

Intel anthropologist says humans forming deeper relationships with their gadgets

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Having an anthropologist working for Intel is interesting enough, but there’s more: this sociologist argues humans are having more social interaction with their electronic devices.

Bell, who is set to speak Thursday at Intel’s developer forum in San Francisco, says the first step is the creation of devices like the Moto X that have always-on sensors listening for our commands.

“There’s an implicit promise in the listening,” Bell told AllThingsD in an interview on Wednesday.

Bell said she started thinking about this notion after watching a YouTube video of a Furby attempting to interact with Apple’s Siri.

Of course, many devices today still have trouble comprehending what we are saying, let alone caring about us. But the tie between us and our devices is clearly growing, Bell says, if we have reached a point that people sleep with their smartphones within arm’s reach. The shift from personal devices to devices with which we truly have a relationship will take time, she said, perhaps a decade or more.

In her travels around the world, Bell says, people often describe their smartphones in highly personalized ways. Bell recalls one person saying of her phone, “I fight with it sometimes, but we make up, and I know it will always have my back.”

Interesting. This argument seems similar to that made by Sherry Turkle in Alone Together. Turkle describes years of research examining how children have social interactions with electronic devices, like Furbies and Tamagotchi. She found kids can form close bonds and had a really difficult time when the device was taken away or worse, died.