"Magic" is referred to here and there in the robotics literature, from "magical moments" afforded by a mobile bubble machine, to "spells" intended to entertain and motivate children--but what exactly could this concept mean for designers? Here, we present (1) some theoretical discussion on how magic could inform interaction designs based on reviewing the literature, followed by (2) a practical description of using such ideas to develop a simplified prototype, which received an award in an international robot magic competition. Although this topic can be considered unusual and some negative connotations exist (e.g., unrealistic thinking can be referred to as magical), our results seem to suggest that magic, in the experiential, supernatural, and illusory senses of the term, could be useful to consider in various robot design contexts, also for artifacts like home assistants and autonomous vehicles--thus, inviting further discussion and exploration.

In 2022, artificial-intelligence firms produced an overwhelming spectacle, a rolling carnival of new demonstrations. Curious people outside the tech industry could line up to interact with a variety of alluring and mysterious machine interfaces, and what they saw was dazzling. The first major attraction was the image generators, which converted written commands into images, including illustrations mimicking specific styles, photorealistic renderings of described scenarios, as well as objects, characters, textures, or moods. Similar generators for video, music, and 3-D models are in development, and demos trickled out. Soon, millions of people encountered ChatGPT, a conversational bot built on top of a large language model.

Jays react angrily when shown a cup-and-balls-style magic trick in which their favourite snack is swapped for a less appealing one. Their responses show cognitive abilities that may come into play when they pilfer food caches hidden by other birds. Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) have impressive memories and show some capacity for imagining the beliefs and intentions of others, known as theory of mind. As such, Alexandra Schnell and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge wondered whether jays would be sensitive to cognitive illusions designed to fool humans. First, they tested six birds to find out which food each one preferred from a choice of worms, cheese and peanuts.

Tom Cruise has gone viral on the popular video-sharing app TikTok, but the clips featuring the'Mission Impossible' star are deepfakes that experts are calling the'most alarmingly lifelike examples' of the technology. An account appeared on the app last week, dubbed'deeptomcruise,' which shows a number of videos depicting Cruise doing a magic trick, playing golf and reminiscing about the time he met the former President of the Soviet Union. The series of clips have been seen more than 11 million times on TikTok as of Tuesday, with many millions more on other social media platforms. Although the clips are for entertainment, experts warn that such content'should worry us'. 'Seeing is no longer believing' rhetoric undermines real video.' An account appeared on the app last week, dubbed'deeptomcruise,' which shows a number of videos that have been viewed more than 11 million times.

In a brightly coloured shipping container in east London, Rubens Filho is asking me to pick a card. "Any card," he says, fanning the pack out face down. "And don't worry, you can show me. I pull out the seven of spades, and show it to him; he gets me to sign my name on it with a marker pen. Then he slides it back into the middle of the pack, puts the cards back into their box and puts the box on the table in front of us. "Now," he says with a grin, "the magic begins." Filho is 51, tall, handsome and infectiously enthusiastic about the power of magic tricks and illusions. Born in Brazil, he's been a keen magician since adolescence. He came to Britain in 2012 to work in advertising, before, in 2015, setting up Abracademy, a startup dedicated to bringing magic – and in particular the skills needed to perform it – to the rest of us. "I think magic has a such a positive twist," he says. "It brings this soft approach that's hard to explain, this role of creating something beautiful." But he is also fascinated by the relationship between magic and neuroscience and psychology, and set up Abracademy Labs, an offshoot of Abracademy, to explore this connection. "Magic has lived in the'glitches' of the brain for a long time," he says. "How you see things, how you form beliefs, how you experience wonder.

Sci-fi and science can't seem to agree on the way we should think about artificial intelligence. Sci-fi wants to portray artificial intelligence agents as thinking machines, while businesses today use artificial intelligence for more mundane tasks like filling out forms with robotic process automation or driving your car. When interacting with these artificial intelligence interfaces at our current level of AI technology, our human inclination is to treat them like vending machines, rather than to treat them like a person. Because thinking of AI like a person (anthropomorphizing) leads to immediate disappointment. Today's AI is very narrow, and so straying across the invisible line between what these systems can and can't do leads to generic responses like "I don't understand that" or "I can't do that yet". Although the technology is extremely cool, it just doesn't think in the way that you or I think of as thinking.

What can stage magic reveal about cognitive biases? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Researchers at the Institute of Neuroscience in Spain, Teatro Encantado in Madrid, and University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona sought to apply AI and machine learning to quantify a professional magician's skills in "naturalistic conditions." They say that their trained system -- which was designed to follow coins as a magician made them appear and disappear -- not only served as a tracking tool but as an "artificial spectator" that could infer their location, paving the way for experiments in a subfield they describe as "artificial illusionism." "Magic is not the violation of the natural order of things, but the command of cognitive processes," wrote the researchers.

Magic is the art of producing in the spectator an illusion of impossibility. Although the scientific study of magic is in its infancy, the advent of recent tracking algorithms based on deep learning allow now to quantify the skills of the magician in naturalistic conditions at unprecedented resolution and robustness. In this study, we deconstructed stage magic into purely motor maneuvers and trained an artificial neural network (DeepLabCut) to follow coins as a professional magician made them appear and disappear in a series of tricks. Rather than using AI as a mere tracking tool, we conceived it as an "artificial spectator". When the coins were not visible, the algorithm was trained to infer their location as a human spectator would (i.e. in the left fist). This created situations where the human was fooled while AI (as seen by a human) was not, and vice versa. Magic from the perspective of the machine reveals our own cognitive biases.

Forget lightning speed calculations, technological superiority and machine-like precision. Thanks to the efforts of some researchers, artificial intelligence can now create magic. "We've done a number of different tricks involving artificial intelligence," says Peter McOwan, a computer science professor at Queen Mary University of London. McOwan and his coauthor, Howard Williams, recently published a study in PLOS ONE on using search algorithms to scour the internet to find the hidden mental associations magicians can use to astound their spectators. "A piece of software is like a magic trick in that it has something that seems amazing," McOwan says.

You are presented with two decks, one with images and the other with words. The magician shuffles and distributes the decks into piles of four cards. You get to choose two piles, one from the word deck and one from the image deck, to make a hand of eight cards. Then you're invited to pick a word card and and an image card from your hand. Once you've selected a pair, you watch the magician reveal a previously written prediction about the cards you've chosen.