Last week, Pepper the robot spoke before Parliament, but this kind of stunt distracts from the real issues AI provokes, says Joanna Bryson
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Last week, a Pepper model robot was hailed as the first non-human to give evidence in Parliament, after it issued pre-recorded answers to members of the UK Education Select Committee during a session on the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”. Rather than shedding light on the advance of robotics, this stunt further obscures it.
It is not the first time I have seen this phenomenon. I began researching AI ethics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1993. Doctoral students passing by what was essentially a statue made …