2021年天津（第二次） Passage C

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence (Al) has been described as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we're actually getting closer to a world where Al is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is heading for its "digital humans", which appear life like on the screen not only in terms of language, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a smile, even a nod. They look close to a human, but not quite.

What lies beneath UneeQ9 s digital humans? Their 3D faces are modeled on actual human features. Speech recognition enables them to understand what a person is saying, and natural language processing is used to work out a response. Meanwhile, another Al company, Soul Machines, is taking a more biological approach, with a "digital brain", that imitates aspects of the human brain to adjust the emotions "fblt" and "expressed" by its "digital people".

Shiwali Mohan, an Al scientist at the Palo Research Center, is skeptical of these digital beings. "They're humanlike in their looks and the way they sound, but that in itself is not being human," she says. "Human qualities also involve how you think, how you approach problems, and how you break them down; and that takes a lot of algorithmic (算 法)design. Designing for human-level intelligence is a different attempt than designing images that behave like humans." She then continues, “If something looks like a human, we have high expectations of them, but they might behave differently in ways that humans just instinctively (直觉地)know how other humans react.

Yet the demand is there, with UneeQ seeing high adoption of its digital employees across the financial, health care, and commercial sectors (行业). "Unless these sectors make their business models much more efficient digitally, they might be left behind," says Chetan Dube, UneeQ9s CEO.

Some other companies are taking their digital beings a step further, enabling organizations and individuals to create digital humans themselves using free-access platforms they provide. "The biggest motivation for such platforms is to popularize Al," Dube says.

Mohan is cautious about this approach, yet she supports the purpose behind these digital beings and is optimistic about where they are headed. "As we develop more advanced Al technology, we would then have to use new ways of communicating with that technology, she says. "'Hopefully, all of that is designed to support humans in their goals."