Virtual children that play with you, cuddle you, and even look like you will be commonplace in 50 years, and could help to combat overpopulation, an artificial intelligence expert has claimed. These computer-generated offspring will only exist in the immersive digital world known as the'metaverse', which is accessed using virtual reality technology such as a headset to make a user feel as if they're face-to-face with the child. They will cost next to nothing to bring up, as they will require minimal resources, according to Catriona Campbell, one of the UK's leading authorities on AI and emerging technologies. In her new book, AI by Design: A Plan For Living With Artificial Intelligence, she argues that concerns about overpopulation will prompt society to embrace digital children. She describes them as the'Tamagotchi generation' -- a reference to the handheld digital pets that became wildly popular among Western youngsters in the late 1990s and the 2000s.

In a stark white browser tab, Sam -- a young blonde woman with perfectly shaped lips -- asks me for the solution to 2 2. I immediately think of the infamous Star Trek: The Next Generation episode in which a tortured Captain Picard is shown four lights. If he admits there are five lights, the ordeal will stop. I'm at home, staring at the future face of the metaverse and trying valiantly not to think about memes from a TV show known for its exploration of ethics and humanity. Sam isn't a real person -- she's a digital human created by Auckland-based tech company Soul Machines. Designed to have a short conversation with visitors about herself, she runs on a proprietary "digital brain" and studies my expressions via webcam.

BabyX, the virtual, artificially intelligent creation of Mark Sagar and his new company, Soul Machines Ltd., looks, sounds, and acts so much like a real baby that interacting with her produces a genuine emotional response -- just like the kind you get when a real baby coos and giggles at you. That's exactly the point: BabyX makes it appealing to humans to interact with an AI, and each instance of interaction teaches her more about what it's like being human. Sagar is a force for the humanization of AI, which he believes may be important to installing a symbiotic relationship between humans and AIs. Many AI experts argue that robots and AI systems can only realize their full potential if they become more like humans, with emotions and memories informing their behavior and decision; those are the things that motivate us to seek out new experiences. Sagar's techniques in this area are radically innovative, in that his detailed, artistically-rendered faces mask biological models and simulations of unprecedented complexity.

People get up to weird things in New Zealand. At the University of Auckland, if you want to run hours upon hours of experiments on a baby trapped in a high chair, that's cool. You can even have a conversation with her surprisingly chatty disembodied head. BabyX, the virtual creation of Mark Sagar and his researchers, looks impossibly real. The child, a 3D digital rendering based on images of Sagar's daughter at 18 months, has rosy cheeks, warm eyes, a full head of blond hair, and a soft, sweet voice. When I visited the computer scientist's lab last year, BabyX was stuck inside a computer but could still see me sitting in front of the screen with her "father." To get her attention, we'd call out, "Hi, baby. Look at me, baby," and wave our hands. When her gaze locked onto our faces, we'd hold up a book filled with words (such as "apple" or "ball") and pictures (sheep, clocks), then ask BabyX to read the words and identify the objects.

Robots that can think and feel like people could soon be living among us, according to one expert. An AI engineer, who has invented a'virtual nervous system', believes it is only a matter of time before robotics hardware catches up to his software. He says responsive robots could be a common sight in businesses and homes around the world within the next ten years. Robots that can think and feel like people could soon be living among us, according to one expert. An AI engineer, who has invented a'virtual nervous system', believes it is only a matter of time before robotics hardware catches up to his software (stock) Dr Mark Sagar is the CEO of Soul Machines, an AI company in New Zealand that specialises in creating hyper-realistic 3D avatars.

On screen an adult talks to a baby, showing images and words that the baby identifies and says aloud. But this isn't a parent talking to a child - rather, it's a researcher talking to an artificially intelligent human known as BabyX. The virtual infant learns and acts just like a real baby, and it could be an important step to creating artificially intelligent brains. Scientist at Auckland University have designed a virtual baby that learns. Called BabyX the computer programme can recognise words and images (shown).

Biologically based computational modeling promises virtual characters capable of face-to-face human interaction. Of all the experiences we have in life, face-to-face interaction fills many of our most meaningful moments. The complex interplay of facial expressions, eye gaze, head movements, and vocalizations in quickly evolving "social interaction loops" has enormous influence on how a situation will unfold. From birth, these interactions are a fundamental element of learning and lay the foundation for successful social and emotional functioning through life. What are the underlying processes from which this most human form of interaction emerges? Will we be able to interact with computers in a face-to-face way that feels natural? This article discusses the unique challenges of realistically simulating the appearance and behavior of the face to create interactive autonomous virtual human models that support naturalistic learning and have the "illusion of life." We describe our recent progress toward this goal with "BabyX," an autonomously animated psycho-biological model of a virtual infant. While we explore drivers of facial behavior, we also expect this foundational approach has the potential for more "human" computer interfaces. We also describe our work on our "Auckland Face Simulator" we are developing to broaden this work beyond infants and give a more realistic face and a greater biological basis to adult conversational agents. Simulating the face has great potential for human-computer interaction (HCI), as it increases the available communication channels between humans and machines in an intuitive, accessible way. But it is also a vehicle with which to explore our own nature.

This article originally appeared on the International Business Times. Machines are capable of understanding speech, recognizing faces and driving cars safely, making recent technological advancements seem impressively powerful. But if the field of artificial intelligence is going to make the transformative leap into building human-like machines, it'll first have to master the way babies learn. "Relatively recently in AI there's been a shift from thinking about designing systems that can do the sort of things that adults can do, to realizing if you want to have systems that are as flexible and powerful and do the kinds of things that adults do, you need to have systems that can learn the way babies and children do," developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told International Business Times. "If you compare what computers can do now to what they could do 10 years ago, they've certainly made a lot of progress, but if you compare them to what a 4-year-old can do, there's still a pretty enormous gap."

This article originally appeared on the International Business Times. Machines are capable of understanding speech, recognizing faces and driving cars safely, making recent technological advancements seem impressively powerful. But if the field of artificial intelligence is going to make the transformative leap into building human-like machines, it'll first have to master the way babies learn. "Relatively recently in AI there's been a shift from thinking about designing systems that can do the sort of things that adults can do, to realizing if you want to have systems that are as flexible and powerful and do the kinds of things that adults do, you need to have systems that can learn the way babies and children do," developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told International Business Times. "If you compare what computers can do now to what they could do 10 years ago, they've certainly made a lot of progress, but if you compare them to what a 4-year-old can do, there's still a pretty enormous gap."

Machines are capable of understanding speech, recognizing faces and driving cars safely, making recent technological advancements seem impressively powerful. But if the field of artificial intelligence is going to make the transformative leap into building human-like machines, it'll first have to master the way babies learn. "Relatively recently in AI there's been a shift from thinking about designing systems that can do the sort of things that adults can do, to realizing if you want to have systems that are as flexible and powerful and do the kinds of things that adults do, you need to have systems that can learn the way babies and children do," developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told International Business Times. "If you compare what computers can do now to what they could do 10 years ago, they've certainly made a lot of progress, but if you compare them to what a four year old can do, there's still a pretty enormous gap." Babies and children construct theories about the world around them using the same approach scientists use to construct scientific theories.