How to Build a Human Page #3

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coming down here?

Well, we're just driving along here

on that side in this direction.

The van comes hammering at us for

some reason and you've got

that women there and a pushchair,

and she's going to be hit if

we avoid it.

The car has to make a decision to

take the hit or

to kill the mother and baby.

What would you do?

I don't know! I don't know what

I would do in that split second.

That's a really difficult decision

for anyone to make,

for a human to make. How can a car

decide which life is more valuable?

I don't think it should, myself.

The robot we're building won't need

to make life-and-death decisions.

But it will have to harness Al's

decision-making powers to

think like me.

It's being built on

a modest industrial estate on

the outskirts of Penryn, Cornwall.

I wasn't expecting the hub of

the robot build to be next to a B&Q.

I'm wondering if it's going

to be a...mop head.

'Will Jackson is at the forefront of

constructing humanlike robots.'

Well, hello. Hello.

'To be convincing,

robots need to reason,

'learn and understand so they can

react almost instinctively like us.'

Hello, how are you? I'm very well,

thank you, how are you?

I'm very well, thank you.

He's great.

He's very much a robot,

you definitely know that this is

a machine, not a person.

He's pretty limited.

'Will plans to apply the knowledge

acquired building RoboThespian RT4

'as a basis for

constructing the AI version of me.

'In order to be convincing,

'the robot will need to master

the complexity of language.'

So the first thing that's going to

happen is somebody's going to

speak to the robot and we've got

microphones in the ears that

pick up the sound.

At that point, it's just sound,

it doesn't mean anything.

So we have to turn the sound into

words, into texts.

Once we've got the sound as text,

we've got to try and find

the meaning.

What is this person actually saying

to me? What's the key word?

What did they ask about?

And once we've got that meaning,

we have to try and think of

a sensible reply.

We have to then turn that

back into speech.

So we're going to have to take

a computer-generated version of your

voice that sounds like you.

While we're doing all of this,

the robot can't just sit still.

So it has to have all the little

actions that you would have.

The way you'd listen, the way you

think about what somebody's going

to say, the way you think about what

you're going to say.

You've got to get all these little

subtle things right,

all at the same time.

The brain in this robot has got to

come up with an answer that

makes sense even when it's never

heard the question before.

It's a huge challenge and we have

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