Ikea makes furniture and household goods, not technology. And yet, the Swedish company’s external innovation lab, Space10, is launching a global survey meant to gauge people’s thoughts about artificial intelligence. Central to the survey’s mission is helping Space10 and Ikea understand what form consumers want AI to take.
Do we want our machines to act like machines, or do we want them to have a personality? Should they be male or female? Should they have names?
Should AI reflect each individual’s worldview? Should it live only on our phones or in our homes, or should it permeate the environment we live in? Should it be able to read and react to our emotions? These are the questions that AI designers and engineers are already asking about the machine learning-enabled technologies–and now Ikea wants to ask the rest of us, as well.
The survey, called Do You Speak Human?, launches today in Barcelona, Spain, where Space10 has set up voting booths for people to take the survey (they’ll travel to Copenhagen, Denmark, next). But the survey is also available online, accompanied by the familiar characters Ikea uses in its assembly instructions.
While only a few hundred people have submitted results so far, the takeaways are intriguing: Generally speaking, people prefer an AI that appears to be human, that’s gendered male, that reflects their worldview, and should be able to read their emotions. People broadly prefer an AI that is motherly and protective rather than purely obedient or more autonomous and challenging.
Space10 says that it will share the results of the survey after analyzing the data, which it plans to use to inform future products. Soon enough, perhaps you’ll be able to pick up an artificially intelligent kitchen island to go with your flatpack bookshelf.