Last Sunday we visited an all-you-can-eat Japanese restaurant which boasted 3ft tall robot waiters complete with cat ears and an array of digital facial expressions and voice prompts. They were as entertaining as they were pointless — fulfilling a role that really wasn’t necessary (given the restaurant still employed humans to bring drinks and take payments), in a way that wasn’t noticeably any more efficient than either a human-led or self-serve approach.

Occasionally the robots would get caught in a mid-aisle stand-off, each alerting the other to its presence and requesting that it move out of the way – something that almost never happens with human waiters. Neither robot could recognise that it was addressing a fellow machine rather than a patron. Both lacked the ability to plot an alternate route around the restaurant. The result was an impasse, diners looking on in bemusement as we waited for the maître d’ to come and reset them.

There’s something reassuring about watching limited, daft, emotionless robots getting things wrong in mildly hilarious fashion. Certainly, no one observing this technology will be worried about the possibility of a near-term existential threat to human civilisation, as is currently the case with Artificial Intelligence.

Regular, everyday people are starting to get a bit worried by AI. Yesterday’s Daily Star carries a stark front-page warning about the risk that AI will create new religions to control our minds before inducing us to blow up the world. The Godfather of AI is similarly worried about its impact (although possibly not that specific scenario). Everyone is worried. But we’re going ahead and building it anyway.

By comparison, just imagine a future in which we kept our technology dumb and focused on rudimentary service provision, rather than attempting to surpass human intelligence in a bid to solve society’s biggest problems. A future in which we refrained from designed advanced AI systems capable of lying to us with plausibility and conviction, but instead focused on building more robots with cat ears.

And if you’re questioning the value of the cat ears, consider this. As Channel 4 taught me, the more that machines become indistinguishable from humans, the more people are likely to try and have sex with them. Which, while probably not existential, may be the most chilling possibility of all. 

Photo by Louis Maniquet via Unsplash