If you’re familiar with the film I, Robot, then you may find the following account quite unsettling.
During a live interview on the UK morning news show This Morning, the world’s most advanced robot exhibited unusual behavior, leaving viewers disturbed.
This humanoid robot, named Ameca, made an appearance in the studio with one of its creators, Morgan Roe, from Engineered Arts in Cornwall, England, in 2023.
Roe shared that a team of 35 individuals was involved in developing the robot. Although many refer to Ameca using she/her pronouns, Roe clarified that he calls Ameca an ‘it’ due to its robotic nature.
Discussing Ameca on the show, Roe explained: “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 human robot interaction, so we’ve really worked hard on the expression and the gesturing.”
He continued, “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.”
Roe elaborated on Ameca’s capability to learn through conversations, much like humans. He stated, “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.”
Eventually, interviewer Holly Willoughby posed the question on everyone’s mind: “Is it going to take over the world one day?”
Roe responded, “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 humorously added, “Well that’s good, don’t lose that remote control.”
While Roe provided his response, Ameca itself was asked by co-presenter Phillip Schofield, “Ameca, do you plan to take over the world?”
Ameca 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.”
However, as Roe, Willoughby, and Schofield discussed the potential risks of AI, Ameca began to act oddly, winking and tapping its nose as if it was aware of something, which was quite disconcerting.
The incident drew comments on YouTube, with one person noting, “When they were talking about the risks of AI, Ameca winks in a way that it seems she has a plan.”
Another viewer remarked, “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.”
While I’m unsure if Ameca has an ulterior motive, it’s a prospect I’d rather not explore further!