Conversations with my Robot

Abstract

Recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI)make the prospect of living with a new humanoid species more realistic than ever before.Moreover, the AI technology is in the process of converging with other technologies such as nanotechnology, information and communication technology, robotics and biotechnology.This "convergence" technology raises new and perplexing questions for the future of human communication.Humans have an almost unlimited desire to communicate, even with angels, trees and dolphins.The converging technologies promise to open up further opportunities to expand this communicative compulsion.Enormous benefits could be in store such as the removal of all the obstacles that during most of human history limited the effectiveness of message transfer.Such obstacles were the restrictions of distance, speed, volume, and reliability.An other essential impediment to human communication across borders has always been the existence of different languages.The advent of communications steered by machine intelligence will almost certainly offer the solution of this problem through advanced speech recognition and instant translation.Although one may easily be carried away with such prospects, it needs to be realized that it is unlikely that the availability, accessibility and affordability of these emerging technologies would be globally and equitably shared.Given the reality of unequal socio-economic positions in the world, one can foresee that such divides as the development divide, the information divide and the digital divide, will be succeeded by a convergence-divide.And, as with the other gaps, this divide will be exploited to consolidate positions of power and privilege.What different modalities of impact on human communication could we possibly expect in the not too distant future?I will briefly discuss human-machine communication, machine to machine communication, communication between living and deceased people, brain-brain communication, and cross-species communication. Human -Machine CommunicationPeople will increasingly communicate with the assistance of machine intelligence and the machines will have ever more human features.Developments in the converging technologies will produce machines with an intelligence that far exceeds human intellectual capabilities.In order to co-exist with these machines humans will have to learn to communicate with a being gifted with superior