So, the last thing I want to touch on very briefly, drawing on a lot of this work that we learned from the social influences, is just now thinking about robots presups themselves as a new communication media. So all the work about Leo was all about the intelligence of Leo and it’s autonomous and it’s learning and it’s doing all this stuff. But what if the robot really is just like a cell phone? So you are communicating to another person through the robot but in this very embodied, co-located, multi-modal kind of way and why is that interesting? Well we all know, you know, from cell phones and teleconferencing systems, you miss a lot of what goes on in facetoface interaction.
And your trust and liking and engagement and persuasiveness is often compromised if you interact with someone, especially for the first time, when you’re not facetoface versus when you make that first contact facetoface. So this is an example of posture mirroring and the role of touch and gesture. You lose a lot of that in our current communication technologies that we use to communicate with each other across distance, but with a robot you can bring a lot of this back.
So this is the Huggable, this is a robotic teddy bear that we’ve been developing at the Media Lab, looking at a robot as a distance learning technology for children. So, an educator, a parent, a grandparent can sort of jack into this robot à la, you know, Diamond Age ractor style to interact. So Dan is playing the role of a child. Imagine Dan is eight, you know. But playing the role of a child where you can read a book together, you could have tacto-playful interactions. I mean, basically robots in your world. And especially for very young children, that’s how they learn. I mean they learn by co-located, co-present, facetoface interactions that are very concrete in the world. So a robot can bring that to you.
So the Huggable, in many ways is a very sophisticated robot. This is basically the ractor idea here where this little video is giving you a flavour of the kinds of interfaces we’ve been developing in the interactions. So, you know, a lot of people have built like these robotic toys and they’re really boring. They just don’t have very interesting behaviour. The power of this idea, it could be Grandma on the other side and you have all of this shared experience and knowledge of Grandma that can be challenged through this cuddly little form factor. In the case of an educator, there’s been lots of studies showing a difference between if children are learning from an adult it might be intimidating or they might feel restricted in their exploration because they don’t want to look dumb. You know, versus peer-to-peer learning.
So this robot puts all of that human expertise in this cute, cuddly little form factor that could really, as you can imagine, change the social dynamic between a child and how they learn with the Huggable versus a child and how they learn with an adult. We could explore totally different learning paradigms. So it’s more of a peer-to-peer, maybe the child would be much more open to exploration, making mistakes and so forth, than they might with an adult. So it’s intriguing to think about, you know, in this case robots, it’s just a new kind of communication medium applied to a lot of different applications I think.
a. Roomba
So, I think then to recap I want to just talk about some various trends that are kind of alluded to in the talk. But what robots might be, what roles they might be in the future. And I think, you know, the first lesson that we’re already starting to see now is, I think robotics, like a lot of computer technologies, you can imagine that will be ubiquitous in the case that things that you interact with you might not necessarily think of as being a robot but it’s incorporating robotic technology. So the Roomba’s a key example of that. If you talk to Roomba owners they don’t think of this as being a robot, they just think of it as being a vacuum cleaner but an autonomous vacuum cleaner.
b. Autonomous Cars
Similarly when you think about cars in the United States, you know, we have these Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grand challenge and DARPA urban challenge in these autonomous driving vehicles. Arguably cars are becoming more and more like robots everyday. They have a lot of computation, a lot of sensing. Things like automatic braking are happening kind of beyond what the human is doing. And now with autonomous vehicles, there’s a lot of major car manufacturers starting to see autonomous cars as the future of urban driving. And that could fundamentally change that relationship of those cars to the driver when the car is no longer the tool that you operate but is a partner that you interact with. A car that might understand your driving goals, your, what you’re trying to accomplish by being in the car or your preferences of music and so forth. So, it could it could transform our relationship that we have with this sort of robot that’s basically your car. So I think this is one trend that you’re going to continue to see.
c. iMAC Commercial
So this is just a funny movie of, 2004, you remember these iMAC commercials when the iMAC first came out? You know, maybe your computer will be a robot, you know.
So again, just to highlight, it doesn’t have to be anthropomorphic, there’s a lot of anthropomorphic robots. Does not have to be anthropomorphic to get this sort of social thing going and I think that’s important to remember.
d. InTouch help telepresence robot
The other, I think, application, you’re already starting to see it. This is the InTouch help Telepresence Robot which a doctor can visit a hospital remotely as a robot essentially, to visit patients and nurses and other doctors at a remote facility through this sort of robotic telepresence. In Japan, people like Hiroshi Ishiguro are taking this to an extreme where he’s created an android in his likeness, and he tells stories. So Hiroshi actually holds two appointments – he is a professor at the University of Osaka and he works at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) which is a big kind of Japanese technology lab in Japan. And he talks about using; he calls it the Geminoid, to interact with his students while he’s still at ATR. So your advisor never leaves, he’s always there. You’re starting to see, you know, the makers of Roomba have now stuck a camera on the Roomba to look at sort of the remote surveillance so of course, telepresence.
e. Keepon
And even these little, this is Keepon. I love this robot. This is a robot that was developed in Japan by Hideki Kozima that’s being applied as a therapeutic tool in autism. So, for children that are on that autism spectrum having the children interact with this little cute, unintimidating thing in order to learn skills like joint attention and so forth. So, robots as a therapeutic tool to help people learn and inquire and improve their social communication skills I think is another really intriguing area.
And then, you know, a lot of my talk is really talking about this, about the partner robot. And I think of course, you know, this is further off. I think you’re already starting to see, you know, examples of course of the other two. You know, Pero in some sense is maybe the simplest kind of social robot technology. This is a seal robot developed in Japan that they’ve been deploying in elder care facilities. Showing that this sort of soft, fluffy, kind of animate like seal robot can help improve the sort of emotional experience of elders with dementia.
So looking again as a sort of therapeutic quality of life application where there’s people with dementia they can’t take care of a real pet but they can interact and get a lot of the benefits of touch and so for the companion animals with a robot. So this is a simple version of that but of course you can imagine the trajectory going up from there. So I’m going to do some wrap up here. And I think one thing that’s an important take away from the work is not just thinking about what robots will be in the future in terms of applications and how they’re going to affect your life. But really if you think about the scientific side of this work it’s really through the process of trying to build these robots and taking inspiration from psychology, neuroscience and natural systems we learn a lot about ourselves as well.
So, you know, this is a very old human story, we’ve been trying to build robots and machines in our image for hundreds of years, thinking about it for thousands of years. And I think it’s just a profound human quest of going through this process in order to think about and reflect upon ourselves and what it means to be human and what it means to be human in the future. So, robots as a scientific tool and a tool for reflection, I think, continues to be a theme and a strong theme of this work and I think a role of robotics in many years to come.
And then, finally I just want to wrap up, you know, I started this talk talking about Star Wars and how I was inspired to do this largely because I saw this movie as a young kid. You know, and life has a way of coming back in loops. So, because I saw Star Wars as a kid, I developed Kismet. And Kismet was a robot that was finished right around the time of the movie AI and it was actually an article about Kismet in TIME magazine and one of the producers saw that article and called me up and invited me to consult on the movie as a sort of scientific bridge during the promotional phase. So I didn’t actually advise on the movie itself but I was basically there to help field questions from the press about the themes in the movie. I don’t know how many people saw this movie but this was the Kubrick-Spielberg film about a robot boy who could love.
And in that movie of course the robot that I loved was Teddy. Teddy was a great character. And through that I met Stan Winston and when I met Stan; I told Stan I’d just finished building Kismet, I said we should build Teddy but we should really build Teddy. And that’s what became Leonardo. So, in many ways Stan and I share the same vision, the same dream in that Stan, coming from performance and Hollywood and special effects, his dream was to build a real character.
What he meant by that is that robots in the movies like Teddy here, I mean they’re basic, they’re just puppets. They’re only brought to life on the screen by a whole team of puppeteers who are controlling all these degrees of freedoms so Teddy had like 40 points of motion. Stan’s dream was to build Teddy that had a life and existence off the set too. That’s exactly the vision I had for Kismet, C3PO and R2D2. Robots that had personality, persona that transcended the set.
So, I started this great collaboration with Stan. Of course, he is a legend in Hollywood and unfortunately we lost him to cancer way too early. But the dream continues, the dream continues.
But then it turns out a couple of years ago Lucas films teamed up with the Boston Museum of Science to create a show called Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination. So, many of the artefacts in the original Star Wars movies were brought to science museums so there was a touring show across different cities and I think different countries where I actually was asked to consult and participate in this exhibition. And there was this one thing called the robot theatre where I basically was like a character in this theatre. But I had this sort of interaction with C3PO so I actually met Anthony Daniels who’s the actor who played C3PO. And incidentally, Anthony Daniels is the only human who actually appeared in every single movie. The only human actor to be in every single one so it was a great thrill for me to meet Anthony Daniels and you’ll see in that theatre performance there was Kismet. So this wasn’t the actual robot but it was a mock-up but it was kind of like again this sort of closing the loop of seeing Star Wars as a little girl and actually consulting on this movie and actually getting to meet George Lucas himself. So it’s just sort of a nice story of how these things come around to circle.
And then the last thing I want to highlight is, you know, who are building these robots with me? They’re students. They are undergraduate and graduate students; they’re not, you know, people who are 18 years old, 20 years old, they are people who are in there who are not [inaudible] and I think again, if you’re willing to pursue your dreams and use your memories to create your dreams you’re capable of so many things so this is just to acknowledge all of the really brilliant, hardworking and creative students that I have. Work that I couldn’t have gotten through without their help.
I’m going to end.
Derek Mooney
I think you’ll agree that was absolutely fascinating. What would you say if I told you that actually Cynthia is an android? And that the real Cynthia is going to walk through that door any minute? You can see what I mean, when I spoke to her on radio today, why I believe that in the not too distant future I imagine we probably will not quite marrying robots but certainly be living with them. Several things, we’re going to take questions so if anyone has questions please put your hand up, lámha suas and we’ll get a microphone to you. As I was watching that, as you went on and on and on you were answering every question I wanted to ask you.
When you were talking about the obesity I was wondering, did the people who were taking part in this experiment, were they all women first of all or were they women and men? And then, were all of the voices on the robots that you put into these homes in Boston, were they all male voices or were they all female voices?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, so the subject pool that we got for the weight management study were recruited at the Boston Weight Loss Clinic so Dr Caroline Apovian is a pre-eminent authority in weight management at Boston University who is an advisor on the project. It just turned out that 80% happened to be women. You know, we didn’t, we would have preferred a 50% split between men and women but it just turns out for that study, 80% happened to be women but the age range was a nice spread in age from 18 to 72 years of age.
For the control you heard the synthesised voice. That was the voice that was used in all of the studies which was a sort of quasi-female-mechanical robotty kind of sounding voice.
Derek Mooney
The reason I ask you is because women are more conscious about their appearance, I think, than men are when they get to a certain age. The followon question was going to be about the age range you used and that women are more conscious and they’re more willing to make that effort and if you had another woman there beside them helping them along well then it was kind of girl power sort of thing, if you know, what I mean. And I was just wondering did that have any impact on the study you were doing?
The other thing you spoke about was touch and how important is touch and you were talking about the handshake particularly. Because I was interested in this because there was research done by a group of researchers in Iowa University and they had 200 students who were going through an interview process. And they had handshake experts watching the students as they went through the interview process. And they hadn’t been told about this. And they were watching to see how and when they shake hands and who would shake hands. And they found that the people who gave the firm handshake, the men, all got the jobs. And the women who gave the firm handshake all got the jobs. And the ones who had the weak handshakes at the interviews, no matter what else they did, just for some reason didn’t get the jobs and they concluded touch was very important and handshake was very important etc, etc. And I’m sure as you go down the road with your research and you’re looking at this already because it was leaping to my mind as I was seeing it on the screen there, how important this sense of touch is and how important the human figure is. Which is why you don’t just put in the PC, which is why it has to have some kind of form and shape. But why didn’t you dress them? The people had dressed them, why didn’t you dress them?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, you know, people have been raising that question about, you know, are these robots naked? And, you know, we haven’t yet, we’re just starting to now appreciate how much people want to adorn these systems. So you meet people, they talk about cell phones being personalised and you putting your different covers and so forth. People like to adorn these robots as well. So, I guess for us we put these cosmetic shells on in some sense we kind of see that as some form of donning, you know, covering on them. But I think you’re right. I think clothing is a really, I mean culturally it’s a really, it’s another really fascinating topic.
Derek Mooney
Because I’m assuming, you showed some snaps of people
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, robot with a tie, you know.
Derek Mooney
who had put a hat on and stuff.
Cynthia Breazeal
Versus a robot with a [inaudible] baseball cap.
Derek Mooney
They were the people who had these in their homes
Cynthia Breazeal
Those were the people who were dressing them.
Derek Mooney
so they wanted to relate to them. You could see that was screaming out that ‘Actually, this has become my mate’ or ‘I want to make this more humanlike so I’m just going to do this.’
Cynthia Breazeal
A lot of Boston Red Sox caps on the robots.
Derek Mooney
But I just wondered why, you could have dressed them and sent them out dressed.
Cynthia Breazeal
We could have. But then people
Derek Mooney
But that’s why I’m just wondering why you didn’t.
Cynthia Breazeal
Right. Well, basically because we didn’t even think about it. But I think the advantage of letting people do it themselves is that they could personalise it. You know, so that’s probably something that you will actually want to let people do for themselves. It’s almost kind of like when you look at these human-human interaction studies and then look at personality types, that people tend to prefer people with similar personality traits and so forth. Robots might have greater acceptance if you’re allowed to customise them in a way that fits into your home décor, you know, the culture you’re coming from and so forth, so.
Derek Mooney
That’s what I was going to ask you about next, was personality traits. Because there’s a programme on, I think it’s Discovery Living or something which is When Animals Go Bad and you see it when the animals turn on the keepers, whatever. And I was just wondering what happens when robots go bad. And when these robots move onto a stage when they all develop their own little personalities and some of them will be a little bit nasty. I’m thinking of Brenda who I work with has this sonic device in the car that makes her aware when she’s going to back up and reverse into something and it goes beep, beep, beep when she’s going to collide with something. So she turned it off one day and what happened the next day? She actually hit the wall when she was reversing in. Okay, stupid thing. She said she can’t reverse anyway but I’m just wondering, you know, will robots in time develop that kind of trick sense of humour? Or if you like, ‘Okay if you’re not interested in what I have to say, okay sh***.’ You know, what I mean?
Cynthia Breazeal
I mean I think, again it’s what we’re finding from human psychology as well as from human computer interaction that, you know, people pick up on these cues in a really, you know, nuanced way. Whether you intended to design them in or not so I suspect that people assigned a personality to Autumn that we didn’t necessarily attempt to try to craft that model in people’s heads. But just to enact, they develop a personality for that robot. Again, I mean, depending on the goals you have for interacting with the system, you might be the kind of person, or you want the drill sergeant robot because that’s what’s going to help you get your results. Whereas other people might want the sort of empathetic robot because that’s what’s going to connect with them more. I think, you know, these are all intriguing questions that we’re just starting to look at.
Derek Mooney
But the robot learns that the guy has put the biscuits over there or the cookies over there or he’s done this or he’s done that. So then it can develop almost a mind of its own. It sounds almost ridiculous. I find it hard to believe that I’m saying it myself but if it can figure out, if it can reason as you’ve demonstrated, and I have to believe what I’m seeing, then that’s not such a huge leap of the imagination is it?
Cynthia Breazeal
I don’t think it’s a, I mean we certainly have been imagining it, again for thousands of years, so it’s not that leap of imagination. I think, you know, a lot of this work, I think a lot of what makes robotics intriguing is that because of science fiction movies, people have very strong opinions about what robots are and what they could be before they ever really even existed. So, you know, in the United States, you know, the first thing people think about is Terminator you know. If you go to Japan, the iconic robot figure is Atom Boy which is a fundamentally benevolent robot. So you go to Japan and there’s tremendous acceptance of robots. Of course they see robots as being benevolent entities.
So, I mean your question is a very typical question for Western culture where we’ve grown up with this sort of suspicion and this sort of fear of these technologies and I just want to highlight that this is a cultural thing. It’s not a universal thing. I think in a lot of movies, you know, if you talk about inspiration of science fiction, it’s because the machines can’t relate to us and don’t care about us. It’s that because we’re kind of the superfluous or annoying thing that’s just getting in their way. That’s why they, you know, discard us whereas my work is really taking the opposite view which is if robots can actually relate to us and empathise with us and sympathise with us then they can become more socialised in society. And that’s a very kind of science fiction kind of idea.
Derek Mooney
And learn to get the better of us. No, I’m joking.
Cynthia Breazeal
Well, you know, I think a lot of that’s socialisation too because kids, if you look at children, you know, right at the same time where they’re exhibiting real like heart-warming forms of empathy and thoughtfulness they’re also learning how to trick you. I mean it’s the same cognitive competence that’s being played out in two different ways so that’s where the teaching of values and norms becomes important. But that’s a very social process so, you know, I think there’s a bigger question of, you know, what kinds of robots are we going to have in the future. I think we’re going to have many, many, many different kinds. And I can just throw up some slides showing you many, many different kinds of robot. I think, you know, it’s going to be us as a society to try to understand what is the appropriate relationship of people to these kinds of technologies.
What’s the appropriate kind of responsibilities that you want to assign to them and vice versa? And have that be an informed discussion because I think from the scientific side we have to understand these things in order for us to start to be able to make, you know, informed judgements of what’s the appropriate, appropriate roles. So in even things like trust, you know, the fact that you can vary non-verbal cues that affect how much people trust these robots. The reason why that’s important is because you want to design them so that people have appropriate trust. Right, so it’s all about trying to understand it first so that you understand how to responsibly design them and I think that’s a really important thing.
Derek Mooney
The android I saw for the first time, James May on BBC2 who presents a programme called Top Gear, you may not be familiar with it. But he’s done this kind of journey of discovery as to how far robots have come and that was the first time I saw the android, it was like two months ago on TV. But at what stage does control come in? I mean, you’re working away. I mean I couldn’t believe when I saw that programme two months ago how far it’s come and watching this today is another eye opener for me. What stage do governments step in and control or do you have carte blanche, I mean is there an endless kind of pocket there of money for you?
Cynthia Breazeal
I mean, so in the United States stem cell research is one of the big hot areas so I think basically when it’s raised as many technologies, it’s something that needs to be carefully considered. And it’s starting to get out to affect, you know, products and so forth. And then I think, yeah it has to enter into the dialogue. I think right now, I mean we’re still a long way off frankly. I mean progress is exciting but I mean we’re still way off. And it’s really much more about the basic science and the research, to try to understand it. And understand how people interact with things so that we can make an informed decision about how it makes sense to design in and what kind of roles and so forth these machines should have in the future if any.
You know, so I’ve shown you research from robots that’s just a pure communication medium all the way to stuff like Leonardo which is the fully autonomous robot. And you can imagine there’s a whole range and more of possible, yeah, roles and applications in between. But what’s important is to have the dialogue and I think what’s important is to communicate the questions and what we’re learning. And again, I think it’s significant to highlight what we’re learning about people too because again, we’ve been trying to build these machines in sort of our image for hundreds of years and every new technology we up the ante so when you talk about, when the first people are starting to be able to build these very fine gear mechanisms. That’s when you start seeing the first ancient automaton like the Vaucanson Duck and so forth.
And then, over time the mechanical computer came into play and you started to see these more sophisticated and then the electric computer came and so it’s almost like with every new technology we’re able to push this area of inquiry even further. And I think the reason why we do that, a lot of it is because is, through this process we’re trying to understand ourselves. We’re trying to think about ourselves and use this endeavour, I think as a scientific pursuit. And in some cases probably for the last philosophical pursuit to try to grapple with what does it mean to be human and what are humans becoming, what do we want to be in the future? And science fiction does the same thing, right? Science fiction uses robots as a sort of foil.
Derek Mooney
I think science fiction now has to catch up to be honest with you.
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