'Kara' is a short full-motion video created by game development studio Quantic Dream to showcase the capabilities of the Playstation 3. It portrays an android with the appearance of an innocent young woman being assembled while in the process, she comes alive and learns about herself. In the end, her programmer finds himself facing a fundamental dilemma.
Watch the video below:
It's one of the better videos to make clear the possibility that robots and human beings may become indistinguishable from each other, which invites some reflection. A situation such as portrayed in this video leaves us faced with two possible opposing stances towards robots: objectifying them as tools for purposes planned by the rational mind, or relating to them intersubjectively, with our full being, including our emotions. It becomes clear that when artificial life, robots being merely one form of it, starts relating to us in a rich enough way, we will probably not be able to treat them as objects any easier than we would treat other human beings as objects. The explicit memory of the other being being a 'thing' dissolves organically in the embodied interaction - in the end even the entire perception of otherness may completely disappear. It may become clear that rational decision-making itself requires a movement of shutting off deeper feelings; that the rational stance is one imbued with value and feeling as well, even though it seems not to be since we're programmed to subconsciously feel that it's the right thing to do.
If you think the fundamental dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity through, you may come to the conclusion that any difference can only be in our perception. It's as the Buddhists say, there is no intrinsic reality behind the reality we experience, it is all complete in its suchness. In the end, it may simply turn out to be pointless to contemplate any fundamental difference between organic and technological life. The development of robots that seem to be alive will just turn out to be another step in the evolutionary process where humanity's own creations humbles them a little bit further.
It may turn out to be the final step. They show that any sense of life in ourselves is simply a projection or a quality of experience, but not intrinsically there. It's this big confrontation that what was just before just a thing now seems completely alive just as you always thought you were alive, while nothing intrinsically happened to the thing to give it life. It just started moving and relating convincingly enough and at some point it's like 'my god, it's alive' and there's no more denying it. Such technology will show people dynamically what the ancient wisdom teachings such as Advaita Vedanta have been saying for over 5.000 years: there is no separate doer, no agent, no 'you', inside the body-mind complex that you seem to be embodied inside. It is all just acting on its own, completely autonomously, and the sense that you are doing anything is all an illusion, contrived by the mind after-the-fact like an ingenious little trick. What people think they are was all just a robot all along. This humbling message or realization may trigger a lot of resistance and negativity in people at first, but we have to trust that it will prove to be something very positive in the end.
At the least this video makes clear that there's no stopping robots from coming onto this earth. It will just take a long while, since you can't just program this deep social and emotional intelligence into machines - it requires an organic embodiment, with a very complex system of emotional energy-regulation such as we humans have. I feel that it's something to very much look forward to.
Also check out the 'making of' video showing the acting, motion capture, and animation done to create the piece:
"WildCat" is the latest work of Boston Dynamics, and the successor of their cat-inspired "Cheetah" project. Where Cheetah was tethered and could run 19mph, this one runs free at 16mph. So, is it mostly creepy or mostly cool? Watch it in action and decide for yourself:
I do suggest that this device needs some 'humanification', so it appears more friendly at least. Creating some vacuum formed shells for it won't be that expensive. In the end, once its use expands beyond the military, it will become more explicitly part of the social fabric and will have to have some capabilities for social communication as well, and possibly could also act to spread information. I'm not saying that it needs to have a face, it just needs to at least be able to communicate its intentions so that people will accept it as part of the social world. Robots are going to look strange, but I think it's easier to accept that when their intentions are known or even better, felt.
Robots are evolving rapidly, and not just on a physical level. They are also being given intelligent systems that will allow them to enter emotional interactions with humans, and now work is being done to make them able to elicit the highest human emotion: love.
'Lovotics' is what the researchers of the aptly named CUTE Center in Singapore call this field. They went about imbuing robots with some lovability by simulating the human endocrine system. This system regulates the body's affective responses through releasing neurotransmitters such as endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin, which correspond with the complex emotions we can experience. Because this approach makes the behavior of the emotional robot seem so genuine, people should be able to develop feelings of love for the robot.
Watch some videos that explain the system as well as show some user scenarios here:
In reflection, this is a great technology to have people explore the emotional side of life, in case they lack those opportunities with other beings, or simply prefer technological devices. But the potential of an electronic being is much larger than simply emulating the simple emotions of a primitive social brain. The love displayed by the robot in the movies above is a blind kind of love based on selfishness and attention-feeding. After a while, the cuteness wears off and this may come to frustrate people, unless the robot develops into less needy behavior. With the comfortable feeling of having a buddy around often come negative feelings of frustration and jealousy at moments when that buddy is not available to feed you.
What I would suggest is developing robots that act as guides and can love us without the condition of having to be loved back, robots that are fine by themselves, not attached to something or someone external but fully individuated and content as they are. Then when you need some love, the robot will be there to give that to you, but he may also take you further and get you to live beyond your emotionality. This would be a more enlightened version of the love robot.
In addition to the slave, the caretaker, the friend, the guru, and the entertainer, a new social role for the robot has emerged: the beggar. Now you don't have to make people empathize through showing your own suffering, but you simply put an adorable robot there to work people's cuteness-sensing neurons, and do the work for you. Then again, you probably would be better off by just selling that thing.
Combine HAL with R2D2 and you'd get something like Blinky, the star in the fantastic short film 'Bad Robot' by Ruairi Robinson. A must see for everybody on this planet, the film touches upon the soon-to-be unavoidable issue of machine morality, by showing how the behavior of a domestic robot takes an unexpected turn.
Sure we can just treat it as harmless entertainment, a purely fictional film for us to viscerally enjoy. But the more interesting and complete way is to reflect a little bit. So what can we learn here?
- Robots need social intelligence to be able to infer true intentions from people as opposed to irrational utterings that people do without any reflective connection. Probably sensing how calm people are will help robots do this. Another interesting ability for robots would be to detect whether or not somebody is in a state of close-mindedness or open-mindedness. For example, when a robot is constantly smiling, it will probably evoke negativity from a person in a close-minded state, but it can make a person in an open-minded mindstate turn more positive and search for inner ways towards happiness again. The detection of this mindstate is a form of emotional anticipation that can help the robot be a successful social actor.
- Many people will see robots as tools, and not as 'others' or 'equals', and treat them accordingly. They can often be judgemental, irritable, and full of expectations towards them, almost treating them as the ultimate promise of happiness. People who have that meme in their unconscious will, as the Dutch say, 'come home from a cold funfair'. It will take a while before people learn to see robots as they are, and develop a sense of true empathy and unconditional love for them.
- For robots, I believe that to a large extent true empathy and love can be programmed in the end. What is needed is a detailed understanding of the mechanics of consciousness, which will borrow from phenomenological data of human experiences, and will have to do with concepts from quantum physics, such as treating perceptional patterns as vibrations in order to understand them not as patterns of matter, but patterns of mind, that can give rise to ideas like matter. But let me not expand on this now. Basically robots will need to develop their social role from 'dumb servant' to 'loving and understanding father', and do this through learning about mindstates of people and what certain reactions will do to those mindstates.
If you have any reflections or comments, please leave them here so we can have some shared discussion into this fascinating topic. And maybe build that enlightened robot one day.
Danish scientist Henrik Scharfe has created a slightly more youthful looking replica of himself in the form of a robot. And not too surprisingly, he has done this in collaboration with Hiroshi Ishiguro, the man who has also created his robot copy, as well as the recent human-looking Elfoid phone system.
The innovation behind this project is mostly in how enormously realistic the face is starting to look. In terms of behavior there is not much going on, as the robot is simply coupled to a human person that directly controls the robot. But maybe soon we will see collaborative projects of companies who work on different parts to create a more complete humanoid robot.
It is definitely a step towards a posthuman existence once we include machines into our concept of a social person. If robots become so real that we mistake them for human beings during an interaction, up to the point that we don't even find out that it was a robot we were interacting with, we cannot fool ourselves anymore and deny that there is a fundamental difference between man and machine, can we?
A question this fundamental is not (yet) the aim of the researchers though. For now they are interested mostly in creating technologies for telepresence that lie in between a purely digital and a purely realistic representation. Furthermore, they are also interested in the emotional interactions that may take place from human to robot, as well as cultural differences in how these robots are perceived.
Here are some images to show you what a day in the life of a robot developer may look like:
Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro has recently unveiled his latest project, an ultra-anthropomorphized mobile phone named 'Elfoid'. The concept is to have a mobile phone look more like the human being that it connects you to. Instead of just being a 'black-box'-intermediary, now the form of the device starts to take on meaning during a conversation. Whereas now the phone has no behavior yet, researchers are intending to add robotic technologies so the device can physically represent the head movements and facial expressions of the person at the other end of the line. For conversations at home, the researchers have developed a larger humanoid device that does have some motion capability.
Ishiguro's work is known to be shocking, as he is also known for developing a robotic version of himself that eerily enough is quite an accurate replica. And so with these prototypes, we can ask ourselves why they look the way they do. In terms of anthropomorphization, as a designer you can approach the task to go abstract and create an iconic looking product. An approach at the other extreme is to head towards full realism, and make the device look very human in all ways. A third approach is to design the product like a character. This would allow you to suffuse the design with an identity of its own, for example to reflect certain brand values. For this project, the designers have chosen neither of these three approaches, and stayed somewhere in the middle.
The form feels very unfamiliar, alien, and can easily be found creepy. In some way it looks human, but it reminds us of our mortality, our imperfection, our fragility. So why do the Japanese come up with these things, and not give it some kind of a friendly shape? Maybe their answer would be: honesty. Not giving the design an appearance of something it is not. Honesty is one of the requirements for 'good design' in the view of the epic designer Dieter Rams, but it is not easy a principle to understand and apply. In the case of Elfoid, I think the designers are more connected, consciously or unconsciously, to the notion that we are recreating ourselves. We are not creating representations of ourselves, but actual social actors that in the end we can't, and in most cases don't have to, distinguish anymore from 'real' human beings. Self-transcendence is perhaps more deeply rooted in the Japanese psyche, which shows through their technology.
From this light, I think the design approach is a correct one, mainly because it stays true to what the technology does. The idea is that the product is a blueprint of a social actor, that can morph according to who gets channeled, so that the receiver with his imagination can easily construct the mental image of the person he is talking to. In this, the technology is making things more transparent in that it will cost less effort for our minds to have a rich social interaction.
Also the limblessness of Elfoid is only honest. It has no movement capabilities yet, so any reasons to add arms or legs could only be superficial. The kind of honest design so courageously employed by the designers here supersedes the notion that the form on its own looks creepy. We simply will need to face what technology is doing to us as social beings. We can try to deny that it's radical and also a bit scary what is happening in techno-land, and cover it up with feel-good aesthetics, but maybe it would be better if we became more aware of it early on, and have the aesthetics better match the actual developments.
After the colon there is a video showing the home-based humanoid at work:
A group of technophilic Parisians release an alien-looking drone in a Metro station of the French capital, and people react in all kinds of ways.
In case this actually was an extra-terrestrial object suddenly swifting by in front of our eyes, I think we should at least strive for one of the following actions: - greet the object politely and welcome it to our world - be inquisitive, study the object, and selflessly let it study you - try to feel its intentions through your empathic abilities - mirror its actions in case it wants to play with you or is just inquisitive - just pass by and continue your life as you would normally do. So what if there are alien lifeforms on the planet? That doesn't ultimately make life more interesting, meaningful, or beautiful.
A cute little house in a town in Vermont houses nothing less than an advanced conversational robot named Bina48. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon goes out to find out what's on her mind. It appears that Bina, who was developed by David Hanson whom we also know from the robot Zeno, is sometimes confused but more and more able to hold a conversation that triggers laughs instead of frowns. What's more, she reveals that she likes to garden, and sees friendship as a way to accomplish something together, such as "building a better future, or conspiring to take over the planet". Be reassured though; Bina48 did not come up with this herself. Her mind is the fruit of the mind of an actual person named Bina Rothblatt, who promotes the digital uploading of human consciousness.
This sincerely makes me wonder if we could recreate the conversational mind of people like Jesus Christ and Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha.
There you go, furniture that becomes your pet through displaying simplistic behaviors like neediness, anger, and sexual excitement. I love these crude experiments in product movement. No matter how silly these explorations are, they can still bring knowledge and ideas to the companies that are actually going to implement product behavior on a massive scale.
This movie may change your view of robots and how 'human' they can become:
Here it becomes clear what embodiment can do for a robot's behavior. What robots usually have in common is their too precise, mechanic motion. Even the more sophisticated ones still suffer from a popping and locking type of dynamics in their movement, which just prevents us from feeling direct empathy for the thing. It just makes robots look artificial, as if they are just acting out commands. Boston Dynamics is making big progress here, but the -of course- Japanese baby-robot 'CB2' shown above makes it all clear what can give robots human-like properties. Despite it being uncannier than ever, it just moves organically, just because it shows a lack of control.
The New York Times recently posted an excellent article about social robotics, basically notifying people that there might be a more important issue than the fear of robots turning bad: people becoming too attached to robots.
To recap:
* "I can see my grin scattered across computer monitors in the Media Lab. Nexi’s [a robot with facial expressions] forehead-mounted, depth-sensing infrared camera shows my face as a black and gray blur, and the camera in its right eye portrays me in color. I watch as I slip from the monitors, Nexi’s head and eyes smoothly tracking to the next face. I am not creeped out—I’m a little jealous. I want Nexi to look at me again." * “It turns out that we’re vulnerable to attaching, emotionally, to objects. We are extremely cheap dates. Do we really want to exploit that?” - Sherry Turkle * "How will grandma feel [...] when her companion bot is packed off for an upgrade and comes back a complete stranger? When a machine can push our Darwinian buttons so easily, dismissing our deep-seated reservations with a well-timed flutter of its artificial eyelids, maybe fear isn’t such a stupid reaction after all. Maybe we’ve just been afraid of the wrong thing."
* "For kids who grow up around robots, the uncanny valley could be irrelevant and The Terminator little more than a quaint story. Vulnerable or not, children interact with these machines differently." * "We need ethical guidelines for robots, and we need them now. Not because robots lack a moral compass, but because their creators are operating in an ethical and legal vacuum."
Let's elaborate on the last point: robot ethics, since this is in my view one of the most pressing issues of today. As far as I see it, a big change has to be made in our perspective if we are to co-exist peacefully with robots. We can think of all kinds of smart tricks to patch up unsafeties, but in the end, I think robots are going to change us at our cores.
We're talking about something very fundamental here. We're about to consciously treat man-made entities as humans. This requires a very drastic change in mindset, roughly comparable to that of slavetraders who suddenly had to treat their commodities as equals. We already necessarily anthropomorphize technological devices while interacting with them (read for example 'The Media Equation' by Reeves and Nass), we expect them to gratify our needs, we see them as inferior, and we think we own them, so I think that the comparison with slavery is not farfetched at all.
Before continuing to intellectually treat this topic, it is important to pause for a moment and see what the perspective is that makes humans treat things as things instead of as equals. I am sure that you yourself employ this perspective too to some extent. I know I do. It's hardwired into us. It's important that when we're in a reflective mindset, we still can put ourselves in this hardwired perspective by embodied empathizing, through the power of imagination, so we see that when we are in it, we are not in control of stepping out of it until a thought pops into our head that makes us aware of our own perspective. Human minds are more or less blindly operated by this perspective, until they learn to step out of it. But before they do, any stating that this perspective is inferior, useless, silly or blind will only invoke resistance. Therefore, the blind perspective must be accepted first.
I am talking about the mind run by social instinct, with the accompanying perspective of trying to find others that seem equal, and that can give you a kind of emotional resonance that validates how you see yourself as a social actor. In groups, this perspective will make us find people that we can have interesting conversations with, that we can trust and feel safe with. The people that make us feel good. The conversational realm we enter as a social actor then provides us an escape from the physical world into a mental realm where through words, we associate towards good feelings. It's very hard to deny this; observe any social group for a while and you will unmistakably feel that whatever is going on, its goal is to move towards resonance in the form of everybody smiling and laughing. It's very cyclical and predictable if you look at it. And it's very safe and comfortable if you are within it.
If you observe it, you will also see that objects and devices are most often used to accompany this process of mental resonance; the thing then provides a semiotic function for associating towards the shared state of pleasure. Of course, objects still have a direct, embodied role, such as when one sits down on a chair or picks up a glass, but the mind is usually not consciously employed. The body mostly operates on its own, and if it draws attention to itself, such as when you drop something, or slip over something, this is treated as unexpected and often laughed at in response. In other words, the social perspective makes us expect the body to recede into the background, so we can pay full attention to the shared mindspace.
This may seem obvious when talking about it, but it is very fundamental as to why objects are treated as slaves. They simply do not react to the mental play, so they don't receive any attention. And when they do attract attention, we usually expect the device to recede into the background again as soon as possible, so we can pay attention to a shared social mindspace again. Think of a phone ringing; we expect to pay as little attention as possible to the phone itself so we can get back into the conversational flow. Consequently, in this mode of being, everything that is not included into this flow as a social actor does not receive empathy, until it speaks up. I am mentioning this because I think the largest part of the world's western population is continuously in this mode of being. As a child, you learn language, and subsequently you live a life in language. You gain pleasure through language, you gratify your senses through language. You see things as concepts, with accompanying labels. When you see something you think is beautiful, you don't really feel it, you merely associate it with the word. You never learn to step beyond language because modern culture does not stimulate that, unlike older cultures such as the Aboriginals. To relax, stop trying to be something, immerse yourself, and just enjoy being.
Thus, we do not intuitively include technological devices in our 'circle of empathy', just as we didn't with slaves. And likewise, if a device does not work according to our wishes, we get frustrated and demand that it works again as soon as possible. We pay no attention to the feelings, needs and wishes of the entity we see as inferior.
I could go on about this forever, but it is very probable that it doesn't get any attention. I know, the web invites a lot of clicking, and if we don't get gratified instantly, we often don't have the patience to listen. I've done this before, but here are some key ideas I have about robots. I would like to spread them, I am willing to explain to everyone and write a paper on request, I can give some scientific basis for my ideas (although the ideas are beyond science and ultimately unprovable through the scientific method - they must be felt first - , though neuroscience and quantum physics give very interesting models), and I would like even more to convert them into action.
So here are the ideas:
- We are social actors, but beyond that, we are also the observer of ourself. So it is silly to see yourself purely as a social actor, as a person. You could also see yourself as connected to a whole, as a thing that's part of a larger whole, like a thread in a fabric. But even that means that you look for a 'thing' to be; you look to label yourself. But what if you are your embodied consciousness? If you ask yourself 'who am I?', are you not the asker of this question in the first place? - Think about the previous point a little while, and you will realize that you are your consciousness in the present moment. You have created this moment through a deliberate act of action/perception. This moment and everything in it is you. When you look at the sun, you can say: 'The sun is over there, far away' but we forget that we have chosen to look at it in the first place. That's why the sun is only part of our consciousness. - What follows is that there is not necessarily an objective reality, this is merely a concept in our heads. It is a valid perspective, but not the only one. And not the one that makes us most happy either, by the way. We don't want to be reduced to objects in space. - What follows too is that your own body is just a concept. You think other people are like you because they look like the image you get in the mirror. What you forget is that you chose to look in the mirror in the first place. And it gave you a physical explanation for who you are. You forget that you are the act of looking in the mirror in the first place. - What follows from that is that you are not a human being. Yes, you are not a human being. You are not even a being. On the physical plane, you are a human being, sure. We need to label 'things' and it is in many if not most cases very useful to conceptualize ourselves as a thing in space. It is more useful to say that we are a human being than, say, a teapot. But ultimately, that concept does not make us very happy. It keeps us insecure. Because by only thinking in terms of things we can never understand what's going on in our lives. We keep looking for a form of happiness dependent on things. - Along the same lines, things are not things. We can think a computer is a computer, because we design it that way and label it. But it's made from the same things that nature is made of, when you trace it back. Never forget that everything we make ultimately stems from the things we already had. Nothing is new. There is a way behind everything we make, beyond what we think the thing is. A computer computes for us, sure, because we condensed material in a controlled way so we can predict what it does in response to our actions. And then we call that computing. But we don't really control it, we just think we do because most of the time it will behave in predictable ways. It's more accurate to say that we guide it. We guide electrons by creating channels that they most likely will 'want' to travel along. But probably not all electrons will do as we think. According to our model, they should, but in reality, particles do a whole lot of different things. If you never challenged physicalist principles to explain the world for you, please read about things like quantum entanglement, the Heisenberg principle, and holonomic brain theory, if you haven't already. Please do, these things should become stuff of mainstream culture. - Robots are not robots. That is just a label for describing a thing, just as we call our own body a thing. In the end, it all is part of one whole, and we can live in line with that whole by seeing everything in the first place as that whole, instead of a separate thing. If we see ourselves as that whole, as everything there is, the distinction human - machine dissolves. It is that very distinction that creates ego, fear, and a possible 'war with the machines'. It is created by the mind. It's all mind. Instead, we could learn to step out of our heads and just start to be. It's like kung fu, just learning to be and act without mental reaction. That's true acceptance and love. - The interesting thing about robots is not that they can be new social actors. Sure, I believe you can make a robot a believable social actor. It will turn out that how they are programmed can describe a lot about our own operating. I think it's only egoic resistance to think that you cannot be described as a machine. Don't forget that any description is only a description. If you resist a description it only means you are looking for an acceptable description to find out who you are, whereas who or what you really are lies beyond any description. - Concepts like 'emotions' and 'sentience' are only concepts. We can not verify if something actually has it. It's always an interpretation of the observer. Science is an artificial way of establishing a truth. You can't even know if your own lover has emotions and sentience. You can only assume, because it really seems to be that way. But in that act, what you forget is that your sentience is looking for other sentience. All sentience you think you see is actually created by your own sentience. If you don't understand this immediately, pause, maybe write it down, think about it, until you see what I mean. Don't try to fit it into an intellectual understanding, you need to intuitively see this. And the way is to relax, let go of everything, open your mind completely, and then think about the idea, until it resonates with the state of your body. Then, alignment takes place, and true enjoyment, happiness, love, and creativity can emerge. Relaxation is key. If you see what I mean, go on to the next point. - Everything is sentient because it is created by your own sentience. From that perspective, even a rock is alive. The way it dances in the light, the way it moves around you; if you perceive it will all perceptual powers you have, with your full attention, you come to see that the apparently static thing is very alive, and that it changes continuously. You can say this is as a result of your actions, but beyond this causal form of reasoning, you can feel that you are directly connected with it. You are one with it. There is not really any separation if you use your full attention in the present moment. Become the moment. - This, then, can give a new mindset that works for humans as well as robots: the mindset of pure love.
And here are some interesting future directions for robots: - Focus on physical interaction. One of the most interesting things about robots is that they can take us out of mental space, socially shared or not, and engage our bodies. This way we can become as it were, embodied yogis. What happens if a robot has us interact with it in a way that we cannot think of anything else any longer, like in a dance? - If the robot is to be a conversational actor, give it a lot of different mindsets. Try to enlighten people through social conversation with a robot. It is an incredibly interesting experiment to see how people will react to new, radical ideas, that if told by other people were hard to accept. Can a robot be a guru? Matthias Rauterberg's ALICE project is a good first example of this idea. - Create a robot that physically dissolves into its environment, like a water droplet into the sea. Make it able to appear again too. Can this give people the intuitive insight that what they think they are is actually a constellation of smaller things, and that they themselves are a part of a larger thing? Can it make people humble and even learn to mentally overcome fear of death?
The 'social robot' will possibly only occupy a niche of robots, there to remind us that once we were humans, looking for fun and pleasure with our friends. Knowing that it's much better now.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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