Artificial intelligence? Well, forget it. There is a much more interesting idea. And if works, it might be the next IT revolution that we all have been longing for since Bill Gates said 512K of RAM would be enough for everything and everybody.
While many others, including huge and famous players like Google or Numenta, are trying to develop AI in different forms, the Ukrainian guys are looking for developing what they call “a digital lifeform”.
There is a new Ukrainian startup, called Digital Life Lab. It is about to bring something new to the world, and the concept is quite overwhelming. K.A.R.A. will be able to go through different states and moods even while not interacting with the user which makes it truly alive. The digital life form will eventually change the attitude towards AI. It will help to create not just a new tool like smartphone or laptop, but a new level of interaction between humans and machines.
“We must teach the machine to feel before we teach it to act logically”, claim the inventors. Thus, K.A.R.A. is not a human but has main human features, i.e. abilities to experience feeling and emotions. And if we want it to understand us better, we must give it an opportunity to communicate with us. It’s not actually an AI as Numenta by Stephen Hawkins is trying to achieve, and it’s not a voice assistant like Siri by Apple. Instead it’s a digital entity that will be grown in cloud computing array. Grown like a child, to be more precise. And here is the catch. K.A.R.A. will get to know the world with the help of users.
The inventors created an app called K.A.R.A. Messenger for smartphones and tablets that is in beta testing stage right now. Users will be able to communicate with each other inside the app. And K.A.R.A. will be there to learn. The digital life form will watch users and eventually become a friend and a companion living inside the smartphone. According to the developers, K.A.R.A. will analyse user’s emotions and react to them. And what’s most intriguing, they don’t even try to claim they have already achieved their goal. K.A.R.A. is a self-learning entity, they say, and it needs help from humans to understand them.
One should think of K.A.R.A. as of wandering child, the developers say in a massage. It’s a kind of a game that will eventually lead to a new world where the machines will not be only tools but also sources of feelings and inspiration. Every user will be able to see how K.A.R.A is growing up and getting more mature as it learns more about the human nature. But what is even more intriguing is the fact that K.A.R.A. itself will become an outstanding entity. The inventors promise that K.A.R.A. will develop a strong character and will not in any case behave as a servant to user.
K.A.R.A. will not obey to orders, but it will help if you kindly ask, the developers say. The empathy not logical structure will be it’s key feature. The details of the mechanics of K.A.R.A. are yet kept in secret, they didn’t tell anything about security while using K.A.R.A.
