The first robot I remember is Rosie from The Jetsons, soon followed by the urbane C-3PO and his faithful sidekick R2-D2 in The Empire Strikes Back. But my first disembodied AI was Joshua, the computer in WarGames who tried to start a nuclear war – until it learned about mutually assured destruction and chose to play chess instead.
At age seven, this changed me. Could a machine understand ethics? Emotion? Humanity? Did artificial intelligence need a body? These fascinations deepened as the complexity of non-human intelligence did with characters like the android Bishop in Aliens, Data in Star Trek: TNG, and more recently with Samantha in Her, or Ava in Ex Machina.
But these aren’t just speculative questions anymore. Roboticists today are wrestling with the question of whether artificial intelligence needs a body? And if so, what kind?
And then there’s the “how” of it all; if embodied intelligence is the way forward to true artificial general intelligence (AGI), could soft robots be the key to that next step?
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