Caution and optimism in the development of artificial intelligence

VINCENT TEETSOV

At the end of 2020, Waltham, Massachusetts-based robotics company Boston Dynamics released a video of their robots (including two of the humanoid Atlas model and a four-legged model called Spot), dancing to the Contours’ “Do You Love Me”.

It gave a playful vision of robots and artificial intelligence, a sharp contrast to the bleak vision cultivated in so many works of fiction, such as Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The video was well conceived, because dancing is precisely the kind of action that we do not associate with robots. In many ways, dancing is play. The word “robot” – invented by Czech artist Josef Čapek and introduced to the world by his brother, writer Karel Čapek – is derived from the Czech “robota”, meaning “forced labour.”

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A still from Boston Dynamics’ “Do You Love Me?” video.