When AI Becomes People: And The Role Of Science

Okay, take it easy. We’re not talking about the Singularity just yet.

The idea is that you can name your AI agents, to personalize them a bit, and make delegating tasks to them seem more natural. You can chat with them, too, verbally, thanks to newly engineered voice modes in models like GPT.

I was poking around and found this from Atomic Bot where the writer thinks up characters like “Concierge Clara,” illustrating the pros and cons of humanizing the bots. I like this, especially the second part:

“Keep the name to one or two syllables and check that it doesn’t mean something odd in another language.”

It would be awkward if you named your AI something that’s offensive to people in another part of the world.

Anyway….

You Can Give It a Profession, Too

Taking things a step further, you can also give the AI entity a job title. We’ll soon have AI doctors, AI teachers, maybe AI cab drivers, although that still makes some of us abundantly nervous.

One of the things I liked about a presentation I heard at the Next Endeavor event this past September in Mountain View, CA was the title: “AI Scientists are Here: Can We Trust Them?”

I thought this was one more instance of ushering in that age of AI vocation. But also: it’s about science, so let’s talk about some of that.

Prior to getting into a lot of the conceptual stuff, though, panelist Piotr Byrski of Molecule.one introduced a character named “Maria” who is, well, non-human.

“We built Maria,” he explained, “and Maria is a physical AI system that is capable of doing autonomous research in chemistry. So she comprises both the AI part, which is a bunch of agents and specialized models capable of the entire scientific workflow, from literature research through experiment design, all the way to data analysis, and a purpose-built lab where the experiments get executed and the feedback from the real world is provided.”

Here’s one of Maria’s notable achievements, given to me by Copilot:

Give that lady a kewpie doll!