Artificial Superintelligence – Human Welfare and the Dilemma of Decision Making
A great result of our ArtCast4D Project on unleasing creatity!
This interactive experience explores the multifaceted evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its profound impact on human life, with a particular focus on its role in shaping well-being and decision-making autonomy. By placing cutting-edge AI technologies at the focus of discussion, the goal of this experience is to highlight their transformative influence on society. Through a compelling philosophical journey that connects ancient Greek thought, from Plato and Aristotle, to the realities of modern technological advancements, visitors are invited to engage with critical questions and ethical dilemmas. This thought-provoking experience broadens perspectives on the future of AI and its growing role in shaping humanity.
The experience is organised in three conceptual/physical areas; motivation, exploration and reflection, which offer rich multimedia and interactive content to guide visitors through the promised philosophical journey. Below we reveal some details on the technologies that were employed to implement the interactive experiences.
Follow the evolution of AI in time
The line of AI evolution is laid out in a large interactive table consisting of 6 joint touch screen monitors that invite visitors to interact with the milestones of AI and learn about the technological breakthroughs that brought the remarkable achievements of today.
The same milestones are also associated with questions of multiple choice that urge visitors to check against the knowledge they have gained previously.
This interactive experience is implemented using Unity and the TouchScript library, allowing multi-touch support so that many visitors can interact with the table simultaneously.
Converse with Socrates
The opportunity to converse with AI as if discussing with a real human being, couldn’t be absent from an experience of this kind. The conversational capabilities of AI have now reached human-level performance, while the use of advanced 3D graphics can mimic the human appearance and behavior in a highly convincing manner. In this respect, two totems with embedded touch screen monitors allow visitors to converse with an avatar representing the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, either by selecting from a list of questions produced by a chatbot developed by our partner EXUS, or by engaging in an open discussion with the avatar.
This is a highly interactive and engaging experience that incorporates several edge technologies, including: a) Large Language Models (ChatGPT), to empower the avatar’s responses, b) Meta-humans and Unreal Engine 5, to offer a highly realistic view of the Avatar using advanced 3D graphics, c) Lipsync and facial cues (Oculus Lipsync), to mimic realistic facial expression when speaking, d) Speech-to-Text (Google Cloud), to transcribe the visitors’ questions into text that can be handled by the large language model, e) Text-to-Speech (Microsoft Azure AI Speech), to utter the responses using realistic voice and pronunciation, and f) Automatic translation (DeepL), to translate from English to Greek and vice versa, as well as support the subtitling functionality.
Raise your hand and vote
The last room is all about reflecting on the philosophical concepts exposed previously and calls visitors to vote on an ethical dilemma about the things we would be willing to trade for enjoying the benefits of artificial intelligence. This room is intended to mimic the greek ancient agora where votes were cast by raising hands.
This experience offers the opportunity to trigger discussions around another very useful application of artificial intelligence that deals with computer vision. A symbolic eye is used to convey this notion, that employs the YOLOv11 computer vision model to perform human detection for identifying and locating people in the room, as well as gesture recognition by detecting the position of human joints. As a result, the eye is not only capable of counting the votes (i.e., the number of people that have raised their hands), but also to pick one of the voters and stare at him/her until the hand is lowered, creating the feeling that AI is watching him/her. To implement this experience AAASeed was used, which is an open source software designed for artists and curators to tap into the world of 3D real-time graphics and immersive experiences. The communication between the python script that performs the YOLO detection and AAASeed was achieved using the OSC protocol.
