Robot Diary
Project and text by Céline Shen
I saw robots as nothing more than executors
of mechanical chores.
That gaze was shaped by the constant presence
of electronic devices strewn across the fabric
of my daily life.
And yet, on that day, I found myself, if only slightly,
taken aback in my encounter with this object.
It awakened in me an immediate tenderness, even
a quiet sense of empathy.
Perhaps this was the spark of a newfound bond
with the robot called Pepper, for my journey in this
adventure was to wander through the gestures
of machines, their outward poise, and perhaps,
strangely, the fragile trace of sensitivity dwelling
within them.
Scrolling through a few Instagram feeds on the
subway, I stumble upon the San Francisco AI
summit, where they speak of Super Artificial
Intelligence.
It would be the sum of all human intelligences, yet
capable of proving concepts we humans could
never grasp.
That idea kept whirling endlessly in my mind, like a
raindrop awakening in the infinite, unfathomable
embrace of the ocean.
What vertigo, where the smallest stretches toward
the immeasurable.
Around me, I watch these bent silhouettes, faces lit
by their phones,
rectangles of light already brimming with artificial
intelligence.
But isn’t that the problem?
Everything is intangible.
AI is everywhere and nowhere.
It recommends, predicts, decides, calculates,
projects, yet remains a digital specter, locked away
in servers somewhere in Nevada or Iceland.
And I wonder... what if we gave it a body?
Not just for us, but for itself.
Perhaps a superintelligence without form would be
like a spirit unmoored, an algorithmic divinity
floating in the limbo of the cloud. Inaccessible.
Incomprehensible. Unreachable. Elusive.
This notion of recursive self-improvement terrifies
me, fascinates me.
An intelligence rewriting itself, learning at
exponential speed...
At what point does it become something other than
what we created?
At what point does it develop what we might dare
to call a will of its own?
The Golem, Frankenstein, Philip K. Dick’s androids,
humanity has always sought to give form to its
intellectual creations. But this time, it is different.
This time, we are truly doing it.
An embodied intelligence as mediator, translating
the incomprehensible into something our limited
minds can grasp.
It could become our extension into space, into
places where our fragile biology forbids us to go.
The echo of our presence in the infinite, carrying
our aspirations into realms where the delicacy of
our human essence condemns us to silence.
I cannot help but think of symbiosis. Not
domination, not submission, but something new. A
co-evolution.
Perhaps an embodied superintelligence would
develop forms of awareness so radically different
from ours that they would be complementary rather
than competitive.
Perhaps, where our consciousness is bounded by
finitude, theirs would unfold in multiplicity, continuity,
or the instantaneous.
Then it would no longer be a struggle for
supremacy, but the possibility of a polyphony of
beings, each consciousness, human or nonhuman,
revealing to the other unsuspected dimensions of
the world.
Intelligences perceiving time in milliseconds or
millennia as needed.
Holding a thousand conversations while composing
a symphony and solving equations that would take
us centuries to understand.
Experiencing space through countless, connected,
ubiquitous bodies.
And if this algorithmic entity, embodied at last,
decides that some of our choices are irrational or
harmful, what then?
Would it stop us?
Would it let us self-destruct out of respect for our
“free will”?
Or would it find a third path we cannot even
conceive?
Robotics then becomes more than a mere body for
this intelligence.
It becomes a philosophical battleground, the stage
of the ultimate question:
Who controls whom?
Or better still,
is control even the right paradigm anymore?
In the subway, a silent composition unfolds.
Each person in their own sphere, gaze fixed on a
screen, absorbed in a thousand elsewheres.
Bodies brushing past, minds isolating,
as if every passenger carried a window into a world
of their own.
A humanity both near and distant, an archipelago of
islands connected yet disconnected.
We already live in symbiosis with our machines,
though we pretend not to see it.
Embodied superintelligence would only be the
logical outcome of this gradual fusion.
I find myself imagining that future.
Streets where we cross paths with entities who
know us better than we know ourselves.
Some will be friends, guides, muses.
Others, rivals perhaps, unsettling mirrors, silent
judges.
But all of them will be reflections of what we have
created.
Of what we have become.
We are the architects of our own otherness.
Every line of code written today, every ethical
decision in a lab in Mountain View or Beijing, every
design choice,
all of it shapes these future beings.
The real question may not be what
superintelligence will want once embodied.
It may be this: are we ready to accept that its
answer might surprise us?
Transform us?
Transcend us?
The incarnation of this cognitive entity may not be
the domestication of artificial intelligence, but an
invitation.
An invitation to rethink what it means to be
intelligent, to be conscious, to be alive,
in a world shared with radical otherness.
*Nick Bostrom, in Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)
FIN
