In a first, humanoid robot addresses UK's Parliament but what happened next is awkward

The humanoid robot Ai-Da made her appearance in the House of Commons on October 11, making her the first android to ever address the Parliament. Developed by the University of Oxford's Aidan Meller, Ai-Da was in the Parliament to speak to the members of the Communications and Digital Committee over the potential threats to creativity by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology. The committee members included Baroness Gail Rebuck, Chair of Penguin Random House, and Lord Edward Vaizey, former MP and Culture Minister. 

Her speech, however, soon got awkward as the robot suffered a technical glitch that rendered her cross-eyed and put her to sleep. This setback was addressed by Meller who rebooted Ai-Da and put sunglasses on the robot before resuming her speech. 

Q&A session with the Robot

Members of the committee also engaged in a brief Q&A session with the robot wherein they asked how the robot produces art such as paintings and sculptures. Notably, Ai-Da is the first artistic robot that made her first public appearance in 2019 at a solo painting exhibition and since has been upgraded to do sculptures and poetry as well. She is most famous for making a portrait of late Queen Elizabeth.

When asked about her abilities, the robot said that the cameras fitted in her eyes along with the AI algorithms and robotic arms help her paint whereas her neural networks analyse a large corpus of text to identify common content and structures to compose poems. 

(Ai-Da with one of her paintings; Image; ai-darobot.com)

“How this differs to humans is consciousness. I do not have subjective experiences, despite being able to talk about them”, the robot said as per Daily Mail. “I am, and depend on, computer programs and algorithms. Although not alive, I can still create art”. Created in 2019 by Meller, it is named after the 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace and was handed over to the Cornwall-based Engineered Arts for international programming. 

The robot was invited for a speech at the UK Parliament to address the fear of many AI experts who believe that machine learning and artificial intelligence would help robots replace humans. This was revealed in recent research by New York University which suggests one-third of AI experts think so.