Artificial Intelligence is NOT a Robot!

“The corporate world is driving employees to work as robots, whereas IT people are humanizing technology…”

Mahmoud Mansi

To what extent will AI (artificial intelligence) be involved in our lives? How many people will resist it, and how many people will embrace it? What about learning and work? What about relationships and mental health?

AI will not only take over the “routine” and repetitive part of a job, as both IT and HR people say to employees. They only say that because they do not want to scare them, or cause a “revolution”. With today’s technology AI to some extent can also take over many tasks that involve decision making, critical thinking and analyzing. What about tomorrow’s technology? What will be left for humans?

A person can fully embrace AI as a “consumer”, and at the same time would fully disagree with AI as an “employee”, or the other way around. What would you feel if you are going to a robot psychiatrist? Imagine yourself talking for an hour to a machine, and you expect that machine to eventually provide you with the “solution”, the cure. Even if it provides you with treatment and guidance, wouldn’t it be awkward? This profession in specific needs human empathy and human interaction – putting aside that there are some human psychiatrics who are no different than robots – if words are coming out of a machine, no matter how right they are, they are worthless! Sometimes we need to debate, we need to see the reflex actions of others, and we have that deep urge to say “thank you”.

But there is just one thing, these words that are coming out of the robot are not words of a machine. Imagine watching an inspiring TED talk on Youtube.com, could it inspire you? Could it change your life? Could it make you emotional? Although you are staring into a “machine”, however the knowledge shared are from a “real” human being. Now imagine if you are browsing the web for a specific topic, you will find a variety of articles and videos on that topic, that are all “data” from real “diversified” human beings. In our example, when the psychiatrist robot speaks, they are words of a machine but words that are formed by a myriad of human beings. It is indulged with a software contains thousands, and maybe millions of uploaded case-studies, schools of psychology and philosophy, methodologies, types of personalities, disorders, different beliefs and religions that impact human behavior, and extra data that links the relationship between a human being and the environment as an external factor that has impact on the mind. The source of this amount of data comes from researchers, authors, psychologists and real life examples of human psychiatrists and patients. In this case, if I am a patient I am not dealing with a robot, but I am dealing with an entire race of humanity, that they are/were all people who had “empathy” and “care” to support a cause they believe in. AI immortalizes their work. AI could be the immortality of human beings not only in form of documenting our knowledge but in putting them into continuous use.

On the other hand, how can I “thank” the robot? How can I thank the person/persons behind my better condition? The AI contains the “references” too and not only the information, where the patient in our example would know who were the “people” involved in the treatment process. The AI could be connected to an “acknowledgements” online platform where it automatically acknowledges the efforts of those people.

In the movie Robocop 2014, “OmniCorp” corporation introduced a machine that includes all criminal records and other relevant data, to fight crime. In the movie both the media and the people were concerned about how “rational” would this machine be when it comes to making ethical decisions. Here the company provided the cyborg police officer model where “he” is part machine and part human, or in other words intertwined to form a “combination” of both. People preferred this model disregarding the results and performance, because it seems that eventually people in the movie trusted or felt psychologically “comfortable” with a human being rather than a machine, would it be same as we trusted paper money more than e-money at some point of our lives?