The World in 2030

The World in 2030 267
Virtual Assistants
Perhaps one of the developments that will be of most
importance to our future lives will be the arrival of ‘software
personalities’ who become our personal assistants, our
companions and our intimates. These companions will
organise our leisure time as well as helping in our work
activities.
In a section below I discuss the ethical and moral issues
we will face as human-like intelligence emerges within our
machines, but here I want to describe how we may first get
to know the software personalities who will become our
permanent and untiring assistants.
Initially, robot ‘pets’ and ‘companions’ will be endowed
with human-like characteristics and a simulacrum of
emotional response (once this arrives our powerful drive to
anthropomorphise non-human creatures will do the rest).
An early example of such work in robotics was described by
MIT Technology Review in mid-2007:
Scientists in the Netherlands are endowing a robotic
cat with a set of logical rules for emotions. They believe
that by introducing emotional variables to the
decision-making process, they should be able to create
more-natural human and computer interactions.
The hardware for the robot, called iCAT, 488 was developed
by the Dutch research firm Philips and designed
to be a generic companion robotic platform.