Robot Babies in Smithsonian
Smithsonian published a fascinating article about "robot babies," examining several research efforts to build machines that have good social skills. Seen above is RUBI the robot with UC San Diego professor Javier Movellan, director of a research group that purchased a robotic Einstein head from Hanson Robotics, makers of the Philip K. Dick head. (The Smithsonian article features a great slideshow of robot photos by Timothy Archibald, familiar to BB readers as the photographer/author of Sex Machines.) From Smithsonian:
A turning point (for Movellan) came in 2002, when he was living with his family in Kyoto, Japan, and working in a government robotics lab to program a long-armed social robot named Robovie. He hadn't yet had much exposure to the latest social robots and initially found them somewhat annoying. "They would say things like, 'I'm lonely, please hug me,'" Movellan recalls. But the Japanese scientists warned him that Robovie was special. "They would say, 'you'll feel something.' Well, I dismissed it—until I felt something. The robot kept talking to me. The robot looked up at me and, for a moment, I swear this robot was alive."Robot Babies
Then Robovie enfolded him in a hug and suddenly—"magic," says Movellan. "This is something I was unprepared for from a scientific point of view. This intense feeling caught me off guard. I thought, Why is my brain put together so that this machine got me? Magic is when the robot is looking at things and you reflexively want to look in the same direction as the robot. When the robot is looking at you instead of through you. It's a feeling that comes and goes. We don't know how to make it happen. But we have all the ingredients to make it happen."
Eager to understand this curious reaction, Movellan introduced Robovie to his 2-year-old son's preschool class. But there the robot cast a different spell. "It was a big disaster," Movellan remembers, shaking his head. "It was horrible. It was one of the worst days of my life." The toddlers were terrified of Robovie, who was about the size of a 12-year-old. They ran away from it screaming.
That night, his son had a nightmare. Movellan heard him muttering Japanese in his sleep: "Kowai, kowai." Scary, scary.
Back in California, Movellan assembled, in consultation with his son, a kid-friendly robot named RUBI that was more appropriate for visits to toddler classrooms.
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As animals, our brains are just so hard-wired to treating things that look like they may have eyes and a mouth and a face as if they are sentient beings. We then have so many deeply-coded natural responses to things we treat as being sentient. It's really amazing how easily this can be tricked.
Reminds one of the theory that religion started from seeing patterns in natural phenomena and thinking, knowing, that that had to be caused by a sentient being.
There was a very interesting study where they had people donating online. They found that if they put a framed picture of Kismet, the robotic face, near the computer, people were more likely to donate. The researchers attributed this to the sub-conscious belief that they were being watched, and the desire to do good while being watched. (Note, Kismet is nothing more that metal wires, oversized eyes, and very simple mouth and ears.)
You know, if they made these things look less angular and concealed more of the wires, then maybe the kids would be a little less freaked out.
I mean, it's easy to imagine a robot going out of control. It's less easy to imagine something convincing as real suddenly going berserk and ripping you apart.
But it's basically the same kind of anthropomorphism people get with animals and such.
I love that the robotics guy's name is "Movellan".
The Movellans were a group of human-like androids who fought the Daleks on the old Doctor Who series.
One of the scientists interviewed in the piece says that "these robots say more about us than they do about machines" and that is almost the totality of my own response.
The author keeps talking about magic when there of course is none. I wouldn't deny that in some parts of the world as we move deeper into this century, a machine that could guide kindergarteners through a crosswalk, or mix me a G & T when I tell it the usual is going to come in handy.
But figuring out why and how and when we humans are hardwired to subconsciously ascribe emotions to inanimate objects, why we are revulsed, or overcome by pity, when we see a machine inadequately engineered to locomote, is the real rub, and what's going to best help us integrate these robots into our public and private spaces in the decades to come.
The article certainly communicates how early we are into the process of creating a machine that can truly interact with us.. But in the end, I think we'll find that creating a near-infinite instruction set is going to be comparatively easy; understanding a human being's reactions to same is the hard part.