Artificial Intelligence Experts are Building the World’s Angriest Robot

“It sounds like the beginning of an apocalyptic sci-fi film. A New Zealand artificial intelligence company” – the Touchpoint Group, “is building the angriest robot in the world in the hopes of helping companies to understand and placate angry customers”, writes Olivia Goldhill for The Telegraph.

Touchpoint Group’s ‘angry robot’ will have hundreds of millions of angry customer interactions uploaded to its database and will be programmed to mimic and repeat these conversations.

“There’s not much variety in human anger. If someone’s angry they’ll just hurl insults at you, there’s not much subtlety of interaction so you don’t have to code anything complicated. Anger is easy to imitate without having to go into depth,” said Dr Stuart Armstrong a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford University.

Touchpoint’s angry robot will only be programmed to show basic signs of rage, and will behave in a markedly different way from a genuinely angry human.

“Robots are not going to start punching the person at the other end of the phone or spreading angry messages on Twitter”, said Dr Armstrong.

“Theoretically, we might one day be able to build robots that exhibit all human signs of anger. There is a complicated philosophical debate about the point at which mimicked emotion and consciousness is indistinguishable from actual emotion and consciousness.”

According to Dr Armstrong it’s extremely difficult to predict whether or not Artificial Intelligence will eventually cause harm to humans.

“Intelligence itself has allowed us to dominate the planet, so potentially higher intelligence might lead to much higher power.”

The possible threat Artificial Intelligence might be posing is currently being addressed by computer scientists, who are trying to code human values or “reduced impact” solutions.

The Touchpoint Group was formed in 2001 in Auckland by Frank Van Der Velden and Steve Shearman to develop software for clients who wished to build better brands by making digital communication with their customers the most engaging experience possible. The company has built an enviable reputation in the Australian and New Zealand markets for creating enterprise software products that really work.

Article Source: The Telegraph, Olivia Goldhill, May, 12, 2015

Image Source: Pixabay