Chris Winfield, founder of Understanding A.I., tells Fox & Friends Weekend host Will Cain about a study showing patients preferred medical answers from artificial intelligence over doctors. Patients are becoming more favorable to having artificial intelligence involved in medicine, according to one study from The Journal of American Medicine, showing that nearly 80% of participants preferred a chatbot's medical responses over a conventional doctor's. "They liked the bedside manner of the A.I. doctor, in this case it was ChatGPT, better than the actual doctors themselves, and they actually felt more comfortable with those answers," said Chris Winfield, founder of Understanding A.I. Doctor surgeon and neurologist use robotic and medical technology to diagnose and examine patient brain with intelligence software. Winfield, who appeared Sunday on "Fox & Friends Weekend," said the blind study kept participants in the dark about who – or what – offered advice for their questions to more accurately shirk off potential biases. He added that one of the implications is that people are unhappy with conventional doctors' bedside manner.

In 2016, Alan Winfield gave an "IdeasLab" talk at the World Economic Forum about building ethical robots. "Could we build a moral machine?" Behind him, pictured on a flatscreen TV, was one of the bots Winfield used in his experiments--a short, cutesy, white and blue human-like machine. Just a few years ago, he said, he believed it to be impossible: You couldn't build a robot capable of acting on the basis of ethical rules. But that was before he realized what you could get robots to do if they had an imagination--or less gradiosely a "consequence engine," a simulated internal model of itself and the world outside. Winfield showed clips of his experiments at the Bristol Robotics Lab in England.

The biobot developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign couples engineered skeletal muscle tissue to a 3D printed flexible skeleton. Although robotic humanoids now perform backflips and autonomous drones fly in formation, even the most advanced robots are relatively primitive when compared with living machines. The running, jumping, swimming, and flying creatures that cover our planet's surface have long inspired engineers. Yet a subset of researchers are not just taking tips from living creatures. These roboticists, computer scientists, and bioengineers are combining artificial materials with living tissue, or making machines entirely from living cells.

The fully programmable Nao robot has been used to experiment with machine ethics. In his 1942 short story'Runaround', science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics -- engineering safeguards and built-in ethical principles that he would go on to use in dozens of stories and novels. They were: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. Fittingly, 'Runaround' is set in 2015. Real-life roboticists are citing Asimov's laws a lot these days: their creations are becoming autonomous enough to need that kind of guidance.

A new generation of swarming robots which can independently learn and evolve new behaviours in the wild is one step closer, thanks to research from the University of Bristol and the University of the West of England (UWE). The team used artificial evolution to enable the robots to automatically learn swarm behaviours which are understandable to humans. This new advance published this Friday in Advanced Intelligent Systems, could create new robotic possibilities for environmental monitoring, disaster recovery, infrastructure maintenance, logistics and agriculture. Until now, artificial evolution has typically been run on a computer which is external to the swarm, with the best strategy then copied to the robots. However, this approach is limiting as it requires external infrastructure and a laboratory setting.

While there is a wide expanse of applications artificial intelligence (AI) brings to the table, some are still concerned about how the technology can be an equally powerful tool to cause harm. In line with this, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Society Standards and Activities Board proposed some standards for the use and development of AI. The implications of the said standardization were intensively discussed in the paper, "Standardizing Ethical Design for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems" by Joanna Bryson and Alan Winfield. A common fear about AI is that the technology will be advanced enough to transcend the ability of humans. This will then enable them to predate the human race to extinction.

Future-predicting robots are all the rage this year in machine learning circles, but today's deep learning techniques can only take the research so far. That's why some ambitious AI developers are turning to an already established prediction engine for inspiration: The human brain. Researchers around the world are closing in on the development of a truly autonomous robot. Sure, there's plenty of robotics that can do amazing things without human intervention. But none of them are ready to be released, unsupervised, into the wild where they're free to move about and occupy the same spaces as human members of the public.

Imagine standing in an elevator as the doors begin to close and suddenly seeing a couple at the end of the corridor running toward you. Even before they call out, you know from their pace and body language they are rushing to get the same elevator. Being a charitable person, you put your hand out to hold the doors. In that split second you interpreted other people's intent and took action to assist; these are instinctive behaviors that designers of artificially intelligent machines can only envy. But that could eventually change as researchers experiment with ways to create artificial intelligence (AI) with predictive social skills that will help it better interact with people.

Its eyes, a complex configuration of cyan dots on a black, rounded screen of a face, sleepily open and it lets out a digitised approximation of a yawn. A compact device that looks like a blend of a forklift truck and PC monitor bred for maximum cuteness, the robot rolls blearily off its charging station on a pair of dinky treads before tilting its screen-face and noticing I'm there. Its eyes widen, then curve at the bottom as if making way for an unseen smile. "Daaaaan!" it announces with a happy jiggle, sounding not unlike Pixar Animation Studios' lovable robot creation, Wall-E. A message flashes up on my iPhone telling me that it, or rather he (being the gender that its manufacturer, Anki, has assigned Cozmo) wants to play a game. Cozmo's head droops, his eyes form into a pair of sadly reclining crescent moons and he sighs. But he quickly cheers up, giving a happy jiggle when I comply with his request for a fist bump and tap my knuckles against his eagerly raised arm.

Blade Runner, the film inspired by Philip K Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is 35 years old this year. Set in a dystopian Los Angeles, the story centres on the tracking down and killing of a renegade group of artificial humans – replicants – escaped from space and trying to extend their lifespans beyond the built-in four years. The story is set in 2019. Surprise, we aren't exactly there in terms of the future Hollywood envisioned in 1982 so it's seized the opportunity to hurl the idea even further into the future, 2049, with a new telling. Opportunism, sure, but while we are a million miles away from flying police cars and sushi bars, the stirrings of AI are evident.