Recognizing the limitations of artificial intelligence Answers On

Future AI may be super powerful but, as Dr. Joanna Bryson of the University of Bath relates, that still won't make it a person. The desire to bestow human life on inanimate material has been a component of our collective imagination since at least the days of Ovid. In his work Metamorphoses he relates the tale of Pygmalion, who sculpted Galatea out of ivory and besought her animation at the hands of Aphrodite. Two thousand years later, we still see that narrative trope playing itself out in stories such as Alex Garland's Oscar-winning film Ex Machina, where an AI developer creates an autonomous female android named Ava as the key component of a Turing Test. From marriage to murder, the finales of these and other similar stories range from wish fulfillment to cautionary tale, but the psychological underpinnings remain the same: the aspiration to take something intrinsically non-human (such as ivory or silicon) and humanize it.