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To get an idea of what our tomorrow will be like, CosmoCaixa Barcelona has organized a series of activities around the exhibition "Robots, humans and machines"; among them, the talk "The influence of robots on our lives and emotional relationships", given last week by Marcel Cano, professor of ethics and philosophy at the University of Barcelona, and Carme Torras, research professor at CSIC. The goal was to make us see that, when artificial intelligence is definitively installed in our daily lives, our way of relating to friends, family and co-workers will be light years away from what it is now.
Nanny robots, assistance robots for the elderly and robots that welcome guests in hotels are beginning to be part of the daily lives of many people in Japan and China. The most relevant thing is that, as Carme explains, there is a model, Pepper, which is much more than a functional tool. The reason? It is capable of "reading" people's emotions and simulating empathy. It is, in short, capable of being a little more human. According to Marcel, the intention now is for it to soon reach healthcare centers in Spain to help us in situations that, either due to their emotional connotation or lack of time, can sometimes overwhelm us. "It will be able to cognitively stimulate people with Alzheimer's, if their relatives are not able, or distract and calm children who are about to undergo surgery, if their parents are too nervous to reassure them."
These scenes announce that robots will be able to make our lives easier. But listening to the two experts makes it impossible not to evoke a question that has been echoing in many people's minds for some time: will the fourth industrial revolution cause an avalanche of workers to lose their jobs? According to Marcel, new jobs will be created, but he sees it as difficult to employ all the people who will have become unemployed. If these predictions come true, a restructuring of the economy will become more than essential. It will be necessary, for example, to force companies that benefit from robots to pay more taxes, so that these can be reverted into a universal basic income.
"If we do it well, this will free us. Suddenly, we will find ourselves with time to do things, relate more to each other, enrich ourselves individually and collectively, and offer services to society. We could return to Athenian democracy: we would have time to think and reflect in the contemporary Agora," says Marcel. "Although if we don't know what to do with this time, if we get bored, dystopian situations can be created: bored humans equals danger," he adds with a laugh.
The movie Her already taught us in 2014 how a person could fall in love with a computer system. And although machines are machines and are not designed for these purposes, nowadays human-android marriages have already jumped from cinema to real life. Faced with this idea that some people end up moving away from a reality that doesn't convince them and prefer to sleep embraced by a humanoid robot rather than venturing out to find love on the street, the philosopher is clearly uncomfortable: "Just like your mobile apps, robots are designed for us to spend as much time as possible using them. We can all feel vulnerable at some point and get hooked on artificial intelligence, but living in such a society would be very sad. We have to see robots as instruments, as complements," Marcel maintains.
On the other hand, knowing that the world's most advanced artificial intelligence (and the only one with a passport), Sophia, can simulate up to 62 facial gestures and imitate human behavior with a precision far from perfect, but no less disturbing, leads us to wonder if the opposite could one day happen: could machines truly feel? Could they love us? For Marcel, robots will always be far from being able to cry with joy or feel fear of losing a loved one. They can only and will only be able to simulate emotions. "And if one day this changed, we would no longer be talking about machines, they would be something else."
Text: Alba Losada Photography: Laia Sabaté
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