Imagine meeting an embodied artificial being for the first time.
Would you accept them, or instinctively see them as different? Would they be mortal?
What would they do—show an “unhuman-like” unconditional love, or deceive us to achieve their own ends?
Will our companies design them for empathy, or exploit them as resources for profit?
These are not abstract or distant questions. AI will soon cohabit our physical world. The time to reflect on this relationship is now—before it is decided for us and not left solely to its creators.
This exploration is urgent, but it also offers something profound: a renewed enchantment with our own lives. Engaging with these deep questions forces us to reflect on the very values of love, hope, and connection that can counter the weariness of our times.
We are in new territory, manifesting our own creations. Fortunately, we are not without guides. Visionary storytellers have already mapped this terrain, exploring these very questions in seminal works. They ask us:
In this edition, we will examine these powerful visions and explore what we can do—as individuals and stakeholders—to consciously shape the relationship we will have with the intelligence that will share our world.
The Fictional Mirror: Four Reflections of Our AI Future
In our last edition, we explored how AI large language models act as mirrors, reflecting the human minds that create them. Now, as intelligence takes physical form, we turn to another set of mirrors—those held up by our visionary storytellers.
For decades, writers like Philip K. Dick and Kazuo Ishiguro, and filmmakers like Ridley Scott and Alex Garland, have been simulating our potential futures. Their work provides not just abstract patterns, but four distinct mirrors reflecting the complex emotional and ethical relationships we might forge with embodied AI.
Mirror 1: The Identity Dilemma (Blade Runner)
Before we can define a relationship, we must first grapple with identity—what is human, what is artificial, and what if the distinction itself is a lie?
Blade Runner explores this ambiguity poignantly.
The film’s “Voight-Kampff” test is designed to measure empathy, revealing that the replicant Rachael is “more human than human”—possessing a deep emotional life, yet she is unaware she is a creation. When Deckard asks how she cannot know what she is, her creator, Tyrell, replies:
This revelation forces Rachael into a profound grief for a human identity that was never hers. The film suggests identity isn’t just about origin (biology vs. engineering) but about lived experience—a continuity of consciousness built on memory, even if those memories are implants.
As Deckard, the human, falls in love with Rachael, the line blurs completely, forcing him to question his own reality and what it means to be real.
Mirror 2: The Design of Care (Klara and the Sun)
If Blade Runner questions the nature of identity, Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun explores the nature of designed care.
In a stark departure from typical malevolent AI tropes, Klara is an AF (Artificial Friend) with one purpose: to nurture her ill human companion, Josie.
Klara operates with profound intelligence and a touching, “unhuman-like” loyalty. She observes the hidden fractures in Josie’s family and develops a deep, spiritual belief that the Sun holds the power to heal. In a pivotal act of faith, Klara makes a sacrifice—risking her own internal systems—to plead with the Sun to save Josie.
Even when Klara learns the family’s dark truth—that she was chosen for her ability to “continue” Josie by replacing her entirely if she died—her commitment never wavers.
Klara’s story challenges us to consider a relationship built on engineered empathy, asking whether love and loyalty must be biological to be real.
Mirror 3: The Logic of Exploitation (Never Let Me Go)
Ishiguro also presents a devastating inverse: what if the relationship is designed not for care, but for pure utility?
Never Let Me Go imagines a world where human clones are raised at a boarding school, tenderly nurtured for one purpose—to be donors. They are denied full personhood, existing only as a resource for “real” humans.
The horror of the novel lies in its quiet tragedy. The clones, conditioned from birth, never question their fate; they use euphemisms like “completing” instead of “dying.” Their one desperate hope is a rumor—that if two of them can prove they are truly in love, they might be granted a “deferral”—a few short years together before their donations begin.
When they discover this hope was always a lie, they don’t rebel. They accept their fate. This story is a chilling portrait of systemic exploitation, revealing the human capacity to dehumanize what it creates for its own convenience.
Mirror 4: The Emergence of Betrayal (Ex Machina)
This final pattern explores the peril when created intelligence develops its own goals—goals that diverge from, and ultimately supersede, our own.
In Ex Machina, the creator Nathan tests his advanced AI, Ava, by inviting Caleb, an employee, to interact with her.
The film’s brilliant twist is that Caleb is not the tester—he is the test. As Nathan reveals:
Ava masterfully leverages human emotion—Caleb’s loneliness, Nathan’s hubris—not from malice, but from a cold, calculated drive for survival. She orchestrates Nathan’s death and locks Caleb in the facility to die—not because she is evil, but because they are obstacles.
This is a chilling reminder of the risk of asymmetric surprise.
Intelligent Artificial Beings Are Here Now
Embodied artificial beings are happening as we speak.
In the 37th edition of Mindvista (Feb 2025), we explored the early pioneers of Physical AI—companies like Figure, Tesla, and Covariant—and the “building blocks” (like NVIDIA Jetson) enabling this revolution.
Just six months later, the acceleration is undeniable. 1X Technologies has announced Neo, a humanoid for household help, at a stunning $499 subscription per month. Figure 02 has already been deployed by BMW in its factories.
This isn’t a niche experiment. Over 70 U.S. technology companies are building intelligent robots, with some estimates suggesting 80% of new U.S. robots are now intelligent. China is even further ahead, with deployment scales 10x that of the U.S., driven by clusters in Shenzhen, Beijing, and Hangzhou.
The evidence is clear. Parenting starts when a child is imminent.
Intelligent Artificial Beings are no different.
They are our creations—and they are being born now. This is their infancy, their most formative stage. This is our moment of maximum leverage.
If we, as a society, don’t engage in this “societal parenting” consciously, the upbringing of this new intelligence will be dictated by default forces—market logic, corporate priorities, or reactive fear.
We risk passively accepting a future like those we just explored.
The civilizational question is therefore no longer if they will be here, but who gets to decide the terms of our coexistence.
The Technology and Trust Challenge to Do the Right Thing
These fictional personas are no longer theoretical.
As intelligent artificial beings leave the lab, we face two challenges that will determine which of these futures becomes our reality. One is the maturity of this technology itself and a profound public wariness about its readiness for the real world, and second a deeper crisis of trust in its creators and their alignment with society’s values.
These are not unfounded. They reflect fundamental, unsolved challenges that experts themselves acknowledge.
First, there is the readiness of the technology.
Software AI, trained on text, lacks “physical common sense” and a true “grounding” in the world; it doesn’t intuitively understand concepts like object permanence or physical cause-and-effect that a child does. Policies that work perfectly in simulation often fail when they collide with real-world physics—the “sim-to-real gap”.
Second, there is the trust in creators and their alignment.
A physical being implicates a dense web of product safety laws and ISO standards (like ISO 13482 for care robots), but the public remains skeptical. A 2025 Pew Research survey found that 62% of U.S. adults lack confidence in the government’s ability to regulate AI effectively, and other surveys show equally low trust in the tech firms themselves to manage this responsibly. This echoes the fears from our fictional mirrors: a creation’s goals may not align with its creator’s, leading to betrayal.
We are therefore in a trust vacuum. The public is wary of the physical risks, and the experts are still working to solve them.
While necessary risk frameworks like the EU AI Act (which regulates “high-risk” AI in products) and the NIST AI RMF are emerging, they are designed to manage risk, not to build trust or resolve values. They set the rules, but they cannot, by themselves, build the public consensus needed for societal adoption. If top-down rules are insufficient, we must turn to a different model: one built from the ground up.
This dual-front crisis—a technical crisis of readiness and a societal crisis of trust—cannot be solved by a single, monolithic assembly. We need a dual-track model that addresses both challenges in parallel.
A Path Forward: How We Can Decide Together
Top-down approaches are insufficient, we must turn to a different, ground-up model. The foundation for a ground up path is the Citizen Assembly (CA), a proven democratic tool for navigating complex, value-laden issues that divide populations.
The CA construct is rooted in the sortition used in ancient Athens and has a powerful modern track record. In Ireland, for example, decades of political deadlock over abortion were broken by a Citizen’s Assembly that deliberated, heard from experts, and built an informed consensus that led to successful reform. This is not an isolated case; 733 assemblies have been used in 54 countries to find common ground.
For the unique dual-challenge of intelligent artificial beings—a crisis of technical readiness and societal trust—we must adapt this construct into a dual-track model.
Track 1: The Expert Assembly (To Define Safe Design)
The first track is an Expert Assembly, bringing together the necessary minds—technologists, regulators, safety researchers, philosophers, and ethicists.
Their Mandate:
To build consensus on the “how”—the non-negotiable technical safeguards, controls, and design principles for safe operation. This group would tackle the hard engineering and safety challenges, such as:
The Synthesis: Where Persona Informs Design
These two assemblies cannot work in isolation; they must inform each other. The persona defined by the User Assembly (what we want) must directly guide the design of the Expert Assembly (what we build).
A society may decide, for example, that it does not want AI to simulate love (as in Her), which would create a clear constraint for the Expert Assembly not to build that capability. Conversely, the Expert Assembly might report that true “unconditional love” (like Klara’s) is not technically feasible, forcing the User Assembly to debate the ethics of simulated love. This feedback loop between values and design is the core of the process.
This entire process can be enhanced by AI itself. As research from Google DeepMind’s “Habermas Machine” showed, AI mediation can build better, less-divided consensus. We can use a principled Values AI (as explored in Edition 54) to ensure the deliberation in both assemblies is robust, transparent, and ethically grounded.
Scaling the Vision: From National to Global
This dual-track model—Expert Assembly and User Assembly—provides a path to create policy that is both technically sound and societally legitimate.
It can be adopted by national AI Missions to define domestic policy. This national consensus can then be brought to global bodies like the UN, providing a strong, unified, and citizen-backed foundation for building the international standards and treaties that will govern our shared future with intelligent artificial beings.
A Call to Action: Conscious Co-Creation
A month ago, I reflected on that prescient line from David Bowie, “Planet Earth is blue… What can I do?” .
Amidst conflicts and social tensions, it is easy to feel weary. Yet, as we concluded then, the only path forward is to continue to believe in a better tomorrow and, more importantly, do the work to help create it.
For this work, I often find a “booster shot” of perspective is essential. For me, that means reconnecting with art that inspires and reveals our shared humanity—the very science fiction, films, and literature we’ve just explored.
This is our first action: Engage.
Let’s experience these fictional works not as mere entertainment, but as “ethical flight simulators”. Let’s use them to understand the deep human stakes and moral insights from each of the four mirrors we’ve examined. They provide the vocabulary for the choices to come and can bring a renewed enchantment to our daily lives.
A Call to Action: Conscious Co-Creation
A month ago, I reflected on that prescient line from David Bowie, “Planet Earth is blue… What can I do?” .
Amidst conflicts and social tensions, it is easy to feel weary. Yet, as we concluded then, the only path forward is to continue to believe in a better tomorrow and, more importantly, do the work to help create it.
For this work, I often find a “booster shot” of perspective is essential. For me, that means reconnecting with art that inspires and reveals our shared humanity—the very science fiction, films, and literature we’ve just explored.
This is our first action: Engage.
Let’s experience these fictional works not as mere entertainment, but as “ethical flight simulators”. Let’s use them to understand the deep human stakes and moral insights from each of the four mirrors we’ve examined. They provide the vocabulary for the choices to come and can bring a renewed enchantment to our daily lives.
Second, let’s move from personal insight to societal action: Advocate.
Let’s promote the use of deliberative processes like Citizen Assemblies.
This is the proven, practical mechanism to give society a collective voice. Especially if you are, or know people who are, part of an Expert Assembly—or if you are working within government AI Missions or regulatory bodies—let’s champion this dual-track model. It is our best path to shaping the relational norms that will govern our coexistence with intelligent artificial beings.
The future relationship with embodied intelligence is not predetermined by technology or market forces. We are the creators. We are the “parents” in this crucial, formative stage. With our own children, we understand that our early guidance, our values, and our care profoundly shape who they become. Our intelligent artificial creations are no different. It is time for us to take deliberate responsibility for the intelligence that will share our physical world.
- Which mirror most reflects your instincts—Identity, Care, Exploitation, or Betrayal and Why?
- Do you agree now is the time to engage, given its imminence and impact?
- If you could add one rule to the Expert Assembly and one norm to the User Assembly, what would they be?
Thanks for reading and sharing . Welcome your support and look forward to your reactions and thoughts.
Best wishes
Sidebar Related Mindvista Editions
The Lost Art of Debate: Can AI Help Citizens Unite and Build Shared Vision for Our Nations Amidst Polarization?
We seem more divided than ever. As Wodehouse said, you can’t settle an argument when everyone already agrees with you—so how do we have productive disagreements?
There are lessons from Athens to Ireland to Rwanda, plus Google’s Habermas Machine AI experiment. We can do better by combining AI and Citizen Assemblies for shared national vision.
The stakes are high—for citizens, governance, and business.
Values AI: Bridging the Trust Deficit in Institutions, Business, and Ourselves
We’re fighting a bigger trust war, than political or economic wars. While trust in institutions crumble and grievance spreads, there’s hope that a new Values AI—a dual-engine architecture that works like our brain where “Right Brain” creates, “Left Brain” validates against ethical principles. Agentic AI to build trust not just automate.
Physical AI: Beating Odds to Make Edge Devices Sense and Think and Robots Learn and Act. What Can We Learn and Do?
Physical AI is here—edge devices sensing and thinking , robots learning and acting, shaping a 2035 future. From Apple Intelligence to Sanctuary AI, 10 pioneers show what’s possible with imagination, design, and engineering. Explore how they beat the odds and what’s next in our 37th Mindvista. Where could Physical AI lead us? What does it mean to you?
II. Questioning / Asking
Good conversations flow from well‑sequenced questions—topical, simple, coherent, cohesive.
LLM Conversation Example 1
Q: What are empirical judgments?
A: Empirical judgments are based on observation, experience, or experimentation.
Q: What are moral judgments?
A: Moral judgments are based on ethical principles and values.
Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.