Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

The remarkable capacities of AI chatbots cause many people to believe that perhaps AI has reached a level of intelligence and even consciousness that is comparable to humans. Is this true? I will focus on an experiment with a humanoid robot called ALTER3 developed with Takashi Ikegami and his team from the University of Tokyo. The robot was installed at the Biennale in Venice in 2025 and interacted there with hundreds of thousands of visitors. Visitors could speak to the robot about any topic and in any language. The experiment was set up to explore the question whether an AI-enhanced robot would be able to reach certain forms of awareness and even self-awareness. The results were remarkable but at the same time they show that the richness of human intelligence and consciousness certainly have not been reached in this experiment and perhaps they never will.