There are two references to the classic painting in this episode, the first as Mulder and Skully are the only people in the robotic restaurant.
This is an X-File despite any suggestion otherwise, it's a MOTW, or rather ROTW (robot of the week) episode.
Moreover it's a lesson to us in how we treat our AI.
And we have AI that reacts to our personalities and language built into our iPhones and androids, right into Siri and Google assistant: The more you use them, the more they appear to anticipate what you actually want, sometimes even filling out whole sentences for you.
AI learns just the way children learn, by watching what we say and do. Also you have the old phrase "garbage in/garbage out".
The teaser of this episode refers to Microsoft's "Tay" chatbot, which was designed to mimic a teenage girl but in fact because of a talkback feature built-in to the program, within 24 hours learned how to spout all kinds of racist remarks even without prompting, causing them to shut it down within one day, and protect the account so that nobody new can see the tweets.
And if we as people have problems and issues on how to be polite and respectful to each other, this is going to be more complex of an issue when our technology learns how to think, speak, and act.
The lesson of course here is that you should always tip those who serve you in restaurants.
Of course the irony here is that the more we depend on technology in our homes, the higher chance that the tech will rebel against us. This is not even a new concept, it has been in science fiction since the beginning. The only difference is that this is the future that was seen, and the technology is happening right now.
This is an X-File despite any suggestion otherwise, it's a MOTW, or rather ROTW (robot of the week) episode.
Moreover it's a lesson to us in how we treat our AI.
And we have AI that reacts to our personalities and language built into our iPhones and androids, right into Siri and Google assistant: The more you use them, the more they appear to anticipate what you actually want, sometimes even filling out whole sentences for you.
AI learns just the way children learn, by watching what we say and do. Also you have the old phrase "garbage in/garbage out".
The teaser of this episode refers to Microsoft's "Tay" chatbot, which was designed to mimic a teenage girl but in fact because of a talkback feature built-in to the program, within 24 hours learned how to spout all kinds of racist remarks even without prompting, causing them to shut it down within one day, and protect the account so that nobody new can see the tweets.
And if we as people have problems and issues on how to be polite and respectful to each other, this is going to be more complex of an issue when our technology learns how to think, speak, and act.
The lesson of course here is that you should always tip those who serve you in restaurants.
Of course the irony here is that the more we depend on technology in our homes, the higher chance that the tech will rebel against us. This is not even a new concept, it has been in science fiction since the beginning. The only difference is that this is the future that was seen, and the technology is happening right now.