Robots and Human Interaction
Driverless cars, drones, and AI dominated much of the programming and promotional space at this year's SxSW Interactive festival. This trend is far from a newcomer to SXSWi but this year the prevalence of robotics went to new and quirky levels this year with the Robot Petting Zoo.
While all of these things are just computers in different types of boxes, the word robot seemed far more enticing to the media and the madding crowd. Despite its presence, robot is a relatively new word to the English language -- credited to a Czech playwright, novelist and journalist Karel Čapek, who introduced it in his 1920 hit play, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). When he wrote his cautionary tale about unemotional creatures that were taking over humans, he named them in part from the word robota, meaning servitude or forced labor and the word orbus to mean orphaned.
It's hard not to feel a twinge of pity for these lonely little laborers and evaluate our relationship with them. From the companionable petbots like Pleo, Paro, and AIBO (and that painfully sad funeral), to the more sophisticated humanoids like Pepper and Jimmy and Jibo; and even Geppetto Avatars' software robot, Sophie, a key factor in a robot’s ability to be social is their ability to correctly understand and respond to people’s speech and the underlying context or emotion.
Hence I had to attend "The Rise of the Social Robot" talk, which promised a group of panelists all of whom are “extending the field of social robots in ways we didn’t think possible a few years ago.”
The brilliant Andra Keay, Founder & GM of Robot Launch/Silicon Valley Robotics deftly moderated the panel wherein Mark Stephen Meadows, CSO of Geppetto Labs, Alex Reben, Founder and CEO of Blabdroid, and Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain asked, “as robots get smarter how important is emotion?” “Can robots 'understand' emotion?” and “What are the ethical implications of ‘emotional' robots?”
I love Alex Reben's adorable cardboard robots, one of which was perched on the edge of the table, smiling sweetly at us during the talk. His bots, voiced by an unassuming seven year-old boy, have been making a documentary, roaming around asking people questions like, “Tell me something that you’ve never told a stranger before,” “What’s the worst thing you’ve done to someone?” and “Who do you love most in the world?” All of this to test MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s “ELIZA effect,” which found that people are inclined to anthropomorphize computers and thus engage emotionally with artificial intelligence.
Tiffany Shlain showed an episode from her new series -- a discussion with her husband Ken Goldberg, professor of robotics and automation at UC Berkley, about why we're making so much technology that's seemingly getting more creepy. In the short film, she explores the concepts of surveillance, awareness, and the like-ability curve of revulsion from robots that are too human-like, and humans that are too robot-like.
There was an interesting moment in the discussion when someone asked whether the day would come in which the majority of people would prefer relationships with robots over humans. Based on the uncanny valley and for anyone who's seen Her, that strikes me as highly unlikely but over in another panel about our personal relationship with robots, Dr. Cynthia Breazeal, founder and CEO of Jibo noted, "We've been waiting for the time when these robots are going to come into our homes and our daily lives -- and I think the time is finally upon us. I will argue that we are at this inflection point; I think, in many ways, because of the mobile computing revolution and the cloud computing revolution, and the drivers on that to make sensors/computation/wireless networking very high-performance and cost-effective, it has allowed us to finally build sophisticated robots at a mass consumer price point."
Commoditization of robots as consumer products felt like the key takeaway from the festival but the lingering question for me was when it comes to how we categorize robots: are they pets, toys, or friends -- because they certainly aren’t appliances or computers.
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