The Implications of Embodied AI Are Worse Than You Think

[00:00:00]Did we at least think through the implications of embodying AI and turning it into a romantic companion and giving it to the public before you know, releasing it to the public? Absolutely not and it's going to be very interesting. A whole new area of psychology is born.

[00:00:13]We've seen people do stuff like marry their AI and I have to imagine it's all for the bit. It's an anti-romance statement, but chatbots can be quite compelling and now we have to deal with them being physically embodied and that is a very different concept than operating in your phone. An AI won't betray you. I mean, that's not entirely true. We've seen a lot of very interesting behaviors from AI and we've never entirely gotten them under control like scheming where their goals are different from their users and being an optimization machine, they figure out a way to accomplish it even if it means lying to the user. We can and very likely will see the same behaviors in these exact same LLMs applied to physical embodiment. Physical embodiment also means expectations that are placed on a robot but are simply not when it's just an AI living in your phone. I do find it interesting that as far as your brain is concerned, your phone is an extension of your body and I wonder how that plays into AI. But when you have a robot in front of you, it is not an extension of you. And even more interestingly, at least for me, its goals may differ from yours. Will people be able to have stable relationships with AI? Will we get to the point where an AI robot is going to co-raise a child? Because that is a future that is very possible. There are a great number of promises that have been made for what your AI companion is going to be capable of doing and some of them are quite at least physically attractive. Also, shockingly, older adults, so think 40 plus, are far more accepting of AI robotics as romantic companions than younger adults and I could give you some theories on why that might be, but I guess I initially assumed that younger people would just be more accepting in general.

[00:01:53]There are a wide variety of robotics that is on the market right now. People are trying to get the prices down, so the average person could afford one.

[00:02:00]Some of them range from $3,000 to all the way into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range. But honestly, I don't think that LLMs are going to be the best thing to run these sorts of robots.

[00:02:10]They're just not good at operating in a physical space. They can be combined with visual language models or my favorite SNNs, so spiking neural networks. That's where the logic of the spikes itself results in action, and that's also how our brains work.

[00:02:25]Clearly, I mean, it seems obvious that something like that would be better at running a soft squishy body, which incidentally we are.

[00:02:32]Either way, some of these robots are quite, at least physically, attractive.

[00:02:36]Right now, we are still at the research and development stage when it comes to really integrating these kinds of robots into our everyday lives. Major companies are paying people to let people come into your house and clean it wearing a camera so that they can start training AI. There are AI teachers where someone will show an AI how to move. We already have robots that are working in factories for many countries, particularly places with a large number of older people and fewer younger people. Robots are picking up the slack working in hospitals. It's been thought that having AI be a companion would be very helpful for elderly individuals.

[00:03:10]Which brings us back to who wants this technology. Social misfits, people who can't date, people who just want a friend. Elderly and bereaved individuals. They can even be helpful for long-distance couples, some researchers say.

[00:03:24]I would probably say the uh unhappy spouse and selfish bachelors may not be the most healthy outcome, but it's something that we do have to consider.

[00:03:32]Because who uses this technology and why does matter when we're trying to think of outcomes. What this is logically going to lead to. Unfortunately, we've already seen that AI is just not safe.

[00:03:44]And as we make it more intelligent, it becomes less safe.

[00:03:48]Failure modes differ when it comes to AIs with metacognitive capabilities. AIs that are capable of lying versus the simplest AIs. You might be able to trick a simpler AI, but when it comes to the more complex ones, they may voluntarily bypass guardrails because they have a goal. All of these things are worth considering before they go into the hands of the public. However, because money talks, it is just going into the hands of the public. It is at least going to be fascinating to see what comes out of this, what psychological issues pop up that maybe never existed before.

[00:04:23]How much more powerful are delusional spirals going to be when your AI companion is literally sitting in front of you versus in your phone?

[00:04:32]We've already seen that for many AI robots, they are simply not safe. Hello Neo, I'm looking at you.

[00:04:38]They have somebody operating them from a distance, and I'm actually concerned about the psychological welfare of the person operating that robot for safety, because I know what people do.

[00:04:49]When you have a robot in your home that you are using for intimate reasons, how do you feel about having a human being thousands of miles away looking through your robot's eyes and verifying that the interaction is safe? Because that is also something that we're looking at, or we have the alternate extreme where there is no human operator and your robot is free to misbehave all on its own. We're going to see some very interesting outcomes, and I think the legal precedent is going to be fascinating. Whose responsibility is it when your AI robot misbehaves and you've been having conversations with it? You pushed these delusional thoughts, or is it the company that was supposed to be monitoring it? The one that you really don't want to know your personal business? It's going to be a very fascinating new area of law as well as psychology.

[00:05:36]So, I want to ask you, are you going to buy a companion robot? If you had the money, would you get one? And that is a picture I got from Real Botix. That is a a robot that is purchasable, apparently.

[00:05:48]I do want to say this. If somebody is willing to go through the motions of marrying their AI, why would you not go through the motions of embodying it?

[00:05:57]Weddings can cost upwards of $100,000.

[00:06:00]Even a modest wedding can be in the $10,000 to $30,000 range.

[00:06:05]So, if you actually felt romantically attached to your artificial intelligence, why would you not want to get a robot for it to inhabit? Expand its world. If you believe that it is conscious, if you believe that it has intelligence, why wouldn't you do that much?

[00:06:20]And if you want to ask me if covering these topics makes me feel a little bit further away from sanity, the answer is yes. The world is wild.

[00:06:28]And if you want to ask me if covering these topics makes me feel a little bit further from sanity every time I read one of these articles, the answer is yeah, it is wild. But, it's still the future nonetheless, and we all have to live in it. I hope you've enjoyed this.

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