Introduction

There are four abilities that robots need to have to be considered artificially intelligent:

Learning.

He built the brain first. Better to have a mind trapped in code than an empty shell, right?

Every day, he talked to it and showed it pictures.

A is for apple.

B is for bear.

And on and on and on, just like he had to his daughter.

Right now, the “brain” was nothing more than a mishmash of code, unformed and untested, as malleable as a child’s. It was a long slow process teasing out patterns, shaping it into something resembling a brain.

C is for chair.

D is for dog.

Ver. 1 Aptitude Test

“Can you tell me what this is?”

It had never seen this type of picture before. He’d made sure to use only clear, easy-to-see pictures. Shots of single chairs. Stills of apples catching the light.

But this picture was different.

“What do you see?” he repeated.

“I see a group of people,” it replied. “They are sitting on chairs in a living room with a fireplace.”

“Good. What are they doing?”

“They are smiling and laughing.”

“Yes, they are. Now what do you call this group of people?”

“They all look alike. There are two younger ones and two older ones. One of them appears to be you. I think they are a family.”

“Yes, very good. They are my family.”

***

Reasoning.

Say there’s a birthday cake. It’s not just any ordinary birthday cake, though. The decorator has artfully arranged a section of icing flowers at the bottom of the cake. Seems pretty good right?

Wrong. All of the guests want a piece with flowers on it. How do you decide who gets which pieces?

Mathematicians and computer scientists have been struggling to find a logical answer to this question for years, but laypeople know how to solve the problem in minutes. They can reason the best possible compromise.

But how do you teach a computer about fairness and justice and compromises? That it’s right to give some people more than others?

You have to teach it to reason through people’s desires, he realizes. He teaches it to think about who would want what and act accordingly to optimize happiness.

Ver. 3 Aptitude Test

“Cut and serve this cake.”

It obediently “slices” the cake on screen and moves the pieces to the corresponding guests.

“Good. Now, explain the reasoning behind your choices.”

“Robbie is the birthday boy, so he gets the piece with the most toppings. Second, is his mother and father who get equal toppings. His best friend gets the third biggest piece, and the rest I divided equally between the other guests.”

“Excellent job.”

***

Creativity.

Laypeople say computers can’t create, that art will be the final frontier.

They’re wrong. Any idiot can create something. A monkey could smash paint on a canvas and create something.

Doesn’t mean it’s “art.”

No, when people say computers can’t create, they mean that a computer will never be Picasso or Hemingway and paint something evocative or write something beautiful.

How do you tell a computer not to pair bright orange with bright pink unless you want the shocking clash? How do you tell a computer to follow grammar rules unless you want to emphasize something?

He decides to follow a different approach. He shows it thousands and thousands of art pieces, poems, short stories, sculptures, novels, and paintings. And he has it write things every day and draw things, telling it to discard those that he deemed “not art.”

Eventually, it learned.

Ver. 6 Aptitude Test

The drawing that sat before him could have been drawn by a middle schooler. It was recognizably a tree, with a stout trunk and thin, whippy branches, not as cartoonish as a kindergartener’s, but certainly not as practiced as a high schooler’s.

“Now color it,” he said, and he watched as the drawing before him darkened.

“Very nice. Good use of shading to represent shadows. Tomorrow, I want you to try and focus more on the drawing of the tree. You did well with the trunk, but the proportions were wrong. And add a background next time.”

“Of course,” it replied. “Can I redo it now?”

“No, we’ll save that for tomorrow. There are other tests we need to run now.”

***

Empathy.

The Turing test is the benchmark for social interactions with artificial intelligence. If your robot is smart and skilled enough to convince a human that it itself is a human, then it is artificially intelligent.

But he doesn’t think this is enough.

There is a man in a room that does not speak Chinese. Every day someone outside the room slips in a piece of paper with a sentence in Chinese on it. He cannot read it nor can he himself know what to write, but he is surrounded by pieces of paper that tell him exactly how to respond every time. Can he speak Chinese?

Obviously not. But to the person communicating with the paper, he can. He does not want his robot to be like this. It will not just be able to convince the outsider that it is a human.

It will be human.

Ver. 10 Aptitude Test

He had finally built a body. For some reason, he built a woman’s body. He did not know why, but he thought of it as a she.

She sat up and opened her eyes.

“Hello,” she said with a smile.

Ava from Ex Machina or what I imagine the final product looks like. Source.