That animatronic that they gave citizenship to in Saudi Arabia disturbs me greatly. The thing couldn't even process end of questions. Knowing when to respond was triggered by a human.
Further, most of its responses where canned. And thus, appeared to contain some emotion, if the listener didn't know the entire thing was made up by the developers, and not by the computer.
However, much of our society has been placed under robots in the chain of command. A person walks into social in-security and asks where is there money for that month, the person behind the computer says, the money was not paid because you are dead. What kind of person could continue working in such conditions?
The correct action is 1) ascertain if they are the genuine person. 2) issue a check or cash on the spot. 3) correct error in computer.
Instead, the computer is believe more than the person, and so begins a LONG battle to prove that you are living.
And the SS person wants to keep their job more than doing what is right.
Yeah, the Saudi's were idiots in that respect. That was nothing more than a natural language processing expert system with some physical outward window dressing.
I actually spent a lot of my youth doing natural language processing type stuff, making Eliza and Racter like programs. Thing Turing Test challenge type stuff.
I just shook my head at that giving citizenship. That is a good example of why I wrote this as so many people have no clue what AI actually is.
They basically gave citizenship to a recipe following bot. :)
And not a very good one.
Q: "what about the uncanny valley?"
A: "you'll just have to get over it."
That is a completely, hard coded answer. It sounds like a snarky answer to those who want to believe, but it gets really annoying if you are actually trying to answer that question.
Yeah that was bullshit and just showed how ignorant on the subject the Saudis actually are. Add it to the list.