Artificial Intelligence Is Already Weirdly Inhuman - Issue 27: Dark Matter - Nautilus

Nineteen stories up in a Brooklyn office tower, the view from Manuela Veloso's office--azure skies, New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty--is exhilarating. But right now we only have eyes for the nondescript windows below us in the tower across the street. In their panes, we can see chairs, desks, lamps, and papers. The genuine objects are in a building on our side of the street--likely the one where we're standing. A bright afternoon sun has lit them up, briefly turning the facing windows into mirrors. We see office bric-a-brac that looks ghostly and luminous, floating free of gravity. Veloso, a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and I have been talking about what machines perceive and how they "think"--a subject not nearly as straightforward as I had expected. "How would a robot figure that out?" she says about the illusion in the windows.