Two shifts in relationship between culture and technology inform my thinking about the contemporary state of imagination and trust at the ground level. Both involve the ever more intimate co-mingling of humans with machines.
The first is the emergence of cobotics as a pivot point within conventional robotics, particularly as robots move out into the built environment and become entangled with our everyday lives. For millennia humans have imagined the robotic according to a substitution paradigm. The robot is thus imagined as a humanoid double, at once valuable (when servile) and a palpable threat (when autonomous). This is a construct that stretches from the automata of Hero of Alexandria to the humanoid robots that today’s captains of industry continue to develop and present, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, as the embodiment of the future work force (viz Elon Musk’s rather silly Optimus).
The true face of robotics isn’t a humanoid face. It is to be found in the universe of machines that have revolutionized manufacturing and warehousing over the past half century. But a second face has recently emerged as well characterized by human-machine collaboration rather than human-machine replication. Collaborative robots or “cobots” work in close proximity to humans; they extend and enhance instead of seeking to displace human agency. Cobotics is exemplified by Intuitive’s Da Vinci Surgical Systems which enable surgeons to deliver higher precision, less invasive approaches to many types of interventions. Likewise, the work that I’m involved in at Piaggio Fast Forward involves building semiautonomous “follow me” transporters capable of navigating dynamic, complex, human rich environments by alternately leveraging human navigational skills and embarking on autonomous missions that are context triggered (like going through doors) or operator programmed.
Such systems succeed on the basis of trust and trust is, naturally, a two-way affair. It implies not just human confidence in the sensing abilities and critical judgment of intelligent machines but also machine designs that are responsive to human expertise and expectations. In the case of robotic transporters like PFF’s gita™ or kilo™, that means not just finding the most direct path from point A to point B but devising behaviors that, in addition to being functional, are “smart,” nuanced in the deeper cultural and societal sense.
The second shift I’d like to note involves human-machine creative collaboration: the transformational role that Artificial Intelligence is having on creative practices ranging from image making to music to video to storytelling.
Most people forget that, in the 1955 proposal for the summer workshop at Dartmouth College where the field of Artificial Intelligence was born, the authors listed seven domains of opportunity: “automatic computers” (synthetic data), language use (natural language processing), “neuron nets” (deep learning), size of calculation (symbolic approaches vs. connectionism), “self-improvement” (machine learning) and “abstractions” (logics of representation). The seventh is the one of greatest interest to me: “randomness and creativity.” “The difference between creative thinking and unimaginative competent thinking lies in the injection of some randomness,” they went on to add, which “must be guided by intuition…”
AI is neither “artificial” nor an “intelligence.” Rather it’s a system of large-scale pattern recognition, an averaging system, that generates predictions that are based on many millennia of human words, images, and sounds. And culture and creativity are, of course, more than statistical averages. But AI’s ability to equip the human imagination with a powering system that operates at expanded speeds, scales, and with a highly flexible and fast multimedia toolkit is already opening up exciting new pathways, if not towards the production of reliable facts and critical judgments, then at least to some bold avenues for imaginative and playful human-machine cooperation. The challenge, naturally, is to develop new society-wide critical and creative best practices that draw humanity away from “un-imaginative competent thinking” towards new forms of cultural competence. It’s a work in progress (but one that is underway).
[The above is an excerpt from an article that I contributed to Sole 24 Ore and that was published in Italian under the title “Se il robot lavorerà a fianco dell’uomo,” Dossier section, Sole 24 Ore, Oct. 20, 2024, xvi.]
