AllAnalytics - Emily Johnson - 6 Applications of Artificial Intelligence and a Look at the Future of AI

In the TV show --Westworld,-- artificially intelligent (AI) robots built to look and act exactly like humans take guests through different narratives of an old-west-styled amusement park in order to help them live out their fantasies -- whether promiscuous, adventurous, or deadly. In episode two of the show, one robot--s glitch gives --Westworld-- employees pause, causing them to decommission it. A scientist in the programming division suggests this glitch may be contagious, --so to speak,-- and could infect other robots, or --hosts-- as they call them in the show. This theory is denied by her superior, but later in the episode, the daughter of the decommissioned robot is shown seemingly infecting another host with "consciousness" by repeating what could--be a trigger phrase:--"These violent delights have violent ends." All of this seems like an eerie (and perhaps, impossible) peek into the future, but Christopher Atkeson, a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, told INSIDER that simulated consciousness already exists in products such as Amazon Echo and the iPhone--s Siri, and that AI systems infecting other AI systems is not a hypothetical scenario.