Machines have taken over our lives, and we do not even notice. As of now, machines are just convenience or entertainment for us, but the time when they begin to take away our jobs is not far away. We have accepted that machines will be replacing most of the manual labor in factories, but artificial intelligence robots are meant to replace much more than that. Making pizzas to managing wall street portfolios, acting as soldiers or cops, are just some of the things we can imagine. A Japanese insurance company has already replaced 30 of its employees with AI, and the robots are expected to replace 10 million jobs in the UK alone.
In all of this robot scare, you might have imagined that robots could never take up the creative jobs like writing, singing, art design or marketing but with artificial intelligence that is beginning to change too. Yuxi Liu, An Edinburgh-based designer has created an AI-powered autonomous robot for the beach called ‘poet on the shore’ which she describes as:
“Poet on the beach enjoys watching the sea, listening to the sound of waves lapping on the beach, the murmurs of the winds, children’s conversing, and the incessant din of seabirds. most of the time, it roams alone to listen and feel. sometimes, it writes verses into the sand, and watches the waves wash them away.”
An array of sensors on the robot enables it to see the world around, feel the sea, the wind, and the sounds. Machine learning algorithms find patterns in the environment, create corresponding associations and then translate these perceptions into poems, writing them in the sands of the beach. The multi-sensory abilities of the robot give it poetic senses, without any intervention from a human.
The robot is not meant to serve any human needs, and its ephemeral impact proves its non-utilitarian existence. The robot roams about the beach scribbling verses on the sand, only to be washed away by the waves.
https://vimeo.com/219846787
