The Blink

China has introduced a robot that blinks.

The robot is named Origin F1. It has been built to display realistic facial expressions — blinking on cue, reacting to stimuli, emoting in response to external information. The people who encountered it described the expressions as "disturbingly realistic." That phrase appears in coverage of the robot. The people who wrote it did not appear to intend it as a compliment.

For several decades, the central question in artificial intelligence research was: can the machine think? This is a genuine question with a serious history. The Turing Test was proposed in 1950 as a way to answer it. Researchers have spent, collectively, many thousands of working years on variants of this question. Papers have been written. Journals exist specifically for this. Labs have been funded.

Nobody wrote a paper titled "Can It Blink?"

(I want to be clear that blinking and thinking are different things. A person who is thinking but not blinking is usually alarming. A person who is blinking but not thinking is usually not alarming — they may be a manager, a presenter, or someone waiting for a parking spot. The question of what it means to blink while also thinking has not, to my knowledge, received serious research funding.)

The robot blinks. Whether it is thinking while blinking is not yet established. Whether it is thinking at all is not yet established. What has been established is the blink. The researchers confirmed the blink. They found it disturbingly realistic. The research continues.

The standard proposed in 1950 was the Imitation Game. The idea was that if a machine could convince a human it was human, that would be evidence of something important. The standard applied to conversation — written exchanges, text-based responses, whether the machine could answer questions the way a human would answer questions.

Origin F1 did not take this test. Origin F1 blinked.

The solution, clearly, is to return to the original question. We had a good question. We should get back to it. The robot will wait. It appears patient. It is, at this moment, blinking.