The AI Bots Are About To Get Emotional

Furby and Clippy were early forms; driverless cars and Facebook's chatbots pick up the mantle today. But if AI is to continue its evolution, it'll have to get more convincingly human. Right now, its capacity for emotional depth is seriously lacking. At a cognitive architectures conference in New York last week, Alexei Samsonovich, a professor in the Cybernetics Department at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, proposed a multi-part test. It would involve a human and a machine interacting, but under the guise of avatars in a virtual world.