Robots will soon match humans in creativity, emotional intelligence

As if we didn’t already have enough to worry about when it comes to artificially intelligent machines being able to perform many tasks faster and better than humans can, potentially stealing our jobs in the future and presenting what some technologists worry is an existential threat to humanity, now it appears AI will soon be able to match humans at being, well, human, too.

An Australian AI expert, Toby Walsh, said during the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney recently that he thinks AI will learn and possibly match human traits like creativity, emotional intelligence and adaptability in less than 50 years. And Walsh — a Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW Sydney — predicts robots will be as smart as humans by the year 2062.

But don’t worry about them ultimately presenting some sort of threat or something as drastic as potentially wiping out mankind, he adds. “We’ve been rather mislead by this idea that the robots are going to take over,” Walsh told Time Out. “The robots have no desires of their own, they do exactly what we tell them to. I’m much more worried about incompetence than malevolence – that we’ll get the machines to do something and we haven’t thought carefully about how it’s going to interact with our complex world … Healthcare, transport, how we manufacture things, how we educate ourselves, how we go out and play — it’s going to touch almost every aspect of our lives.”