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3 hours ago
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I saw a clip of a robot being pushed and shoved around by three men. I found it most unsettling. They bully it rather tentatively, without great violence. They find it amusing, until it falls over, at which point it’s the price of the thing that seems to be the worry. This AI humanoid apparently cost $70,000 (£55,800). It’s in the care of one Kai Cenat, an internet-type person – streamer, YouTuber, influencer – you know the kind of thing. Doing the bullying were Cenat and two other gentlemen by the names of Agent and Fanum. I take it they’re in a similar line of business. The incident shown took place in the AMP house. According to Google this is either an office building in east Croydon, or the home of a group of internet celebrities living together in a house in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m plumping for the latter.
I wonder why I find myself caring about this machine. Surely it’s as daft as feeling sorry for the red Austin 1100 Basil Fawlty beat with a bit of tree, which I never did. In fact, on reflection, I might also have felt sorry for the tree, but didn’t. That said, I do have a capacity for strong feelings about inanimate objects. On more than one occasion I upset the children by choosing the most pitiable-looking Christmas tree in the shop. I just couldn’t bear the thought of it lying there on Christmas Eve, cold, unbought, unloved, undecorated, bauble-less. A waste of a life. I’ve had similar feelings for kitchen implements and even an easily replaceable Oyster travelcard which I’d managed not to lose for a long time – until I lost it.
And this poor robot, as a humanoid, isn’t inanimate. It’s smaller than its assailants and has a kind of sagging posture which I assume is something to do with the designers finding a way of keeping this biped balanced, but it adds to the impression of meekness, helplessness. The more I look at it being shoved around the room, the more troubled I get. It seems to sag all the more. At one point it seems to make a run for the door. Ultimately it just kind of looks disappointed with its lot in, er, life. This might even be the most human-like thing about it.
It doesn’t lash out in retaliation for some reason, which may or may not be a sign of its intelligence. Oddly, I don’t find myself wishing it to turn out to be a lethal martial arts practitioner and give those cruel men a good kicking. This, or some version of it, is what would happen in films, quite possibly leading to a takeover of humankind. It’s also the worry expressed at some stage in every discussion about the darker possibilities of AI. But perhaps it’s more disturbing than that. Perhaps humankind hasn’t created humanoid monsters to take us over, so much as pitiful creatures we can treat with contempt.
This might even be a good thing. Given our unpleasant habit of dehumanising groups of people in the interests of visiting all manner of atrocities upon them, there might be some benefit in doing it the other way round – taking something not human and animating it in order for us to exercise our worst inclinations.
I can’t, as you can see, make head or tail of any of it. This isn’t because I’ve watched too many sci-fi films; rather, that I haven’t seen enough. I’m quite sure these themes have been widely explored. But for my part, every human instinct I have is to march into that AMP house, be it in east Croydon or Atlanta, take the poor thing by the hand, and lead it to a better life. I could take it to see West Brom play on Saturday, although that might have it running back to the AMP house at the greatest speed it could muster.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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