Can we just take some questions? Just say your name please if you would. Thanks.
Question [Jan]
Hello, my name is Jan. I have a whole bunch of questions that I’ll just try and pick a couple. So, one of the ones I particularly wanted to ask is have any of your research, has any of it focused on what attributes of the robot interaction walk into the ‘uncanny valley’ and make things abhorrent and completely break that sensation of trust and relationship building?
Cynthia Breazeal
So I think, I mean with respect to the uncanny valley, I think a lot of the research right now that’s working in that space is actually trying to understand and characterise the uncanny valley. So, the uncanny valley is this conjecture that was originally posed by a Japanese researcher called Mori, where the hypothesis was that if you look at affective response, so, liking or just like positive of negative affect and human characteristics, that the idea is as you make various artefacts more anthropomorphic in nature, you get positive affects. And like Kismet is kind of in that area, it’s kind of cute mechanical cartoon sort of thing. But as you get close but aren’t close enough, you plunge into the uncanny valley. You know, and a lot of people probably say like the androids of today are probably in the uncanny valley.
I think if you look at, you know, computer animation, you know, if you look at Tin Toy which is a predecessor of Toy Story and maybe even Toy Story itself, I mean the human characters are in the valley, they’re looking kind of zombie-ish in some sense. But then, as you get closer and closer you can pull out of the valley. And so like Shrek for instance, you might argue that computer animation is finally out of that valley where you can tell they’re not real people but they have an aesthetic onto their own. So this is called the uncanny valley.
And then, I think, you know, and again this is a conjecture and people kind of throw this around like this is a fact but it’s really a conjecture. And it’s applied not only to the way the artefact looks but also to its movement, how it moves. And a lot of the research, some of the research that’s being done say with the android robots is trying to really characterise what is this uncanny valley? How does it vary across age, across culture, across expectations? So, I think it’s much more they’re trying to understand it at this stage.
And there’s probably just a lot of kind of personal preferences and biases as well. I mean somebody might see the androids and get really creeped out and other people might be okay with it. That might be cultural and personal preference and so forth. So, you know, people are starting to look at fMRI studies and things like that to try and even understand what’s going on in the brain when you’re observing these kinds of stimuli. So, there’s an effort to try to understand the uncanny valley right now.
Derek Mooney
A lot of that will have to do with conditioning as well, won’t it? I mean if you’re around something long enough you’ll get used to it.
Cynthia Breazeal
Very possibly.
Derek Mooney
Anybody else want to ask any questions? If you just put your hands up. This gentleman here, if you just hang on until we get a mic to you please so everybody can hear you. Thanks.
Question
Hi, yeah, I was at the lecture on Monday night titled Learning to Live with our Planet, right? And there was less than half the number of people here. And I’m just trying to make the, just trying to figure out that, how it is that maybe can robots help us solve our economic crisis or can they help us solve our environmental issues? I mean, it’s all very fascinating; it is fascinating because I’m interested enough to be here but how does it, how, where are we going? Where do you see robots in our lives?
Cynthia Breazeal
Sure. So, I was talking about the sort of personal robot spectrum. I mean, certainly if you look at the whole field of robotics there’s many, many, many applications from scientific instruments that we send to planets to understand other planets to environmental robots that are being sent out in order to measure and characterise our environment so robots today, I mean, you know, there have been famous under, deep ocean exploration robots that try to understand and characterise the ocean. So I mean, absolutely robotics is playing a profound role in how we understand our planet and enabling us to capture data in a way that we couldn’t do previously through, you know, large networks of robots or sensor networks and so I think they absolutely playing a role today in trying to understand our planet and informing courses of action. So if you implement a course of action, trying to understand the implications of that in, you know, ideally like even in real time to be able to see do we need to correct and so forth. So, robots are absolutely playing a role in helping our planet and all kinds of things.
I mean, see robots as, they’re a technology you know, technology can be applied in all kinds of different contexts. Fundamentally the reason why I do it and why people in robotics do this whole work is because we’re trying to improve the human condition, we’re trying to help people, you know, so that’s really what’s it’s always been about.
Derek Mooney
But will you design an environmentallyfriendly robot? How are they fuelled, how are they powered currently?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, many of them are batterypowered. Not all of them but many of them are batterypowered, sure. You know, rechargeable batterypowered, yeah. And in fact, I mean, there’s a lot of synergy right now going on between things that are driving mobile computing and alternative energy sources for cars and so forth that are feeding back and helping robotics as well. So there’s a lot of kind of synergistic technologies that are being of help in a lot of different contexts that are helping advances in robotics.
Derek Mooney
Sorry, go ahead.
Question [Jamie]
Hi, I’m Jamie and as a hobbyist I’m wondering which robot you think we should get for Christmas?
Cynthia Breazeal
As a hobbyist? You know, it depends on how old. Twenty? Well, you know, Lego Mindstorms is still a classic at toy of the century; I mean that’s pretty good. Toy of the century, so you know.
Jamie
But maybe a bit more advanced so you can do some soldering and programming.
Cynthia Breazeal
Well some Lego Mindstorm you can do a lot of programming yourself. I mean there’s a new, so one of my colleagues Mitch Resnick at the Media Lab was actually a co-inventor of Lego Mindstorms. And he’s gone on his next big project is called Scratch and Scratch is a new programming language that’s designed to make programming accessible to people of all ages. And what it allows kids to do is to create interactive games and tell stories and so forth through programming computers but in a way that it’s like building blocks. It’s kind of like doing Legos but it’s computational blocks. And there are hundreds of thousands of kids and adults too actually using these systems and there’s an automatic translator so you can build a programme in Scratch in English and then you can do a translation and it could be translated into Chinese.
And you can, basically like it’s kind of leveraging off of like, you know, when the internet allowed you take a webpage and copy the code to design your own webpage. These projects are being shared and building this big communities of people. Children or people can take one project and download it, adapt it and make a new project. So there’s a very kind of creative community going on and I think the exciting thing about a lot of that is not just the community but the sort of co-learning creative process that these kids are getting introduced to these technologies in a way that fosters exploration and creativity. That, I think has appeal for people of all ages actually and it’s a very big community right now. So I would encourage you to look at Scratch and design video games and interactive experiences and I think it’s very cool stuff.
Derek Mooney
I was interested also when you were giving your talk you said that the robots are going to be there to help us achieve our goals. Do you not think though that there is a very strong possibility that we’re going to become redundant ourselves? And that, who wants to go to work when you can send a robot out to do it for you?
Cynthia Breazeal
Well I mean, I think you know, that’s a very sort of, you know, 1960s notion of AI and robotics.
Derek Mooney
No, it’s a very modern notion.
Cynthia Breazeal
I don’t actually think so and especially when you talk about, you know, the elderly. It’s really important that you know, people maintain their sense of dignity and independence so when I get old the last thing I want is a robot that I can just sit on my couch and have it do everything for me. I still want to cook my own meals, I still want to garden, I still want to do all the things that I do and enjoy in life.
Derek Mooney
That’s a different thing to working.
Cynthia Breazeal
But I might want something to be able to help me. So my point is just, I don’t see these robots really as things that, you know, replace people and I try to keep stressing that in my talks. It’s really about empowering people and the synergy and the partnership and the fact that in many cases, the fact that these robots aren’t human is what makes them so interesting because they have strengths and abilities that can compliment our own abilities. So I really view it much as this partnership. How do you design robots to be partners for people in a way that they have their strengths and abilities and you have your strengths and abilities and it’s how can those come together to again, you know, fundamentally it’s about addressing human goals and human values.
Derek Mooney
I wonder because I wish I could remember now where this research was done but there was some work done not so long ago, 90% of people hate their jobs.
Cynthia Breazeal
Well that’s really too bad because I love my job.
Derek Mooney
Why on earth would you go to work if you hate your job? Send the robot.
Cynthia Breazeal
So that might be an example of if there’s dull, drudgery type aspects of your work.
Derek Mooney
90%. It’s a huge number.
Cynthia Breazeal
Maybe that makes sense that, you know, you offload those aspects to a machine and you let people do what people are good at which is creativity and collaboration and so forth. So, I mean people talk about computers in the same way so thinking about what machines are good at, thinking about what people are good at and just making sure that it makes sense what people, you know, are doing I think. You know, leveraging our capacities so we feel, you know, more human and experience our humanity versus kind of downtrodden so we feel like machines. You know, I think that’s often a criticism in technological processes.
Derek Mooney
Do you look at a robot as a machine? How do you view it?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah. But I think what I’m trying to challenge is our cultural
Derek Mooney
I saw your little eyes light up when you were showing the pictures at the end.
Cynthia Breazeal
Of what a machine is. Right, I mean I think there’s
Derek Mooney
I think you showed us Leonardo.
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah I know I think, yeah. I mean fundamentally, yeah it’s a machine but it’s not a machine like your toaster. You know, I think what I’m trying to do is challenge our notions of what machines are and what they could be. You know, I mean a lot of what my work is and a lot of what you know, academia is trying to do is encourage us to think, to broaden the way we think, to broaden our ideas, to explore new territories. So I see these robots as being, yeah I mean in a technical sense they’re machines but they’re extending, I think, our notions of what machines are and what they can do.
Derek Mooney
Because when you had the learning robot. What was his name again?
Cynthia Breazeal
The Leonardo robot.
Derek Mooney
That was Leonardo, yeah. Excuse me. So Leonardo was there and when everybody saw him, when somebody walked into the room and said ‘Hello’ everybody laughed here, everybody because the cuddly little image of oh it could be another little person there.
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah.
Derek Mooney
That could easily be, that area there could be very grey matter altogether, couldn’t it? I mean in time?
Cynthia Breazeal
Meaning?
Derek Mooney
I mean, at the beginning it’s a robot because it’s clearly a robot. And then as time moves on, well it’s not a robot anymore it’s my mate, and as time moves on, I fall in love with the bloody thing.
Cynthia Breazeal
You’re really in this kind of mate thing actually. I think there’s something going on.
Derek Mooney
Did you not see the Woody Allen movie all those years ago? Do you remember?
Cynthia Breazeal
You’re fixated on this.
Derek Mooney
No, I’m just curious. I’m curious to know where all this is going. Is there anyone else with a question before we come back to this? Just to get as many people as we can.
Question
The Professor presented a problem at a philosophy of computing class that I took and it was, the question was, is it that we are computers that we think? And I realised only recently that that was an Alan Turing notion. Is it because we are computers that we think? So that’s what you’re saying.
Derek Mooney
We’re very complicated kind of computers. This was something I was with Cynthia today. I mean, you know, for these things to go all the way they’d have to become human almost. Because you break a leg and all the knock-on effects that has. If you break a leg it’s not just a broken leg so physically it has to be fixed up. So, ‘Oh Christ I broke my leg, I won’t be able to go to work tomorrow, I have to pay the bill, I have to go to the hospital, I have to queue up, da, da, da, da, da.’ And where do the robots go about this?
Cynthia Breazeal
Well I think, you know, I think there’s a shift happening where, you know, what we want to do. We’re building the systems to try to understand people and looking at this seriously. We’re trying to design systems to be compatible with people. We’re not necessarily trying to build these systems to be people, you know, and it’s to state the obvious I mean robots are not human and they’re never going to be. Now when we talk about things such as the way that we think and our emotions, I mean robots are not going to have human emotions because they’re just, they’re not human.
Derek Mooney
Or human flaws perhaps?
Cynthia Breazeal
If you look at other species like dogs and so forth, people attribute genuine emotions to dogs but they’re not human emotions; they’re dog emotions. So I think the question that’s raised here, the new question is: if robots can have emotion what are robot emotions in the sense of what makes sense within the context of the fact that these are robots? And certainly there’s interpersonal aspects of that and there’s internal processes aspects of that. I mean people in psychology are learning that emotion and cognition are deeply intertwined and that human intelligence is characterised by that, you know, deep intermeshing of what we consider to be kind of logical cognition and this sort of emotional intelligence.
And I think from that standpoint you could argue that it makes sense for robots to have these ways of thinking and understanding the world because they’re really useful. So, but what does that mean for a machine and I think similarly you keep going to the relationship.
Derek Mooney
Obviously I’m joking; just in case you’re wondering.
Cynthia Breazeal
We don’t know, we don’t know what the human-robot relationship is really going to be because they’re not really among them. And we understand the domesticated animal, dog-human relationship because they’ve been with us for thousands and thousands of years. We tend to map them onto relationships that we know because that’s kind of the obvious thing to do. But I think in reality, you know, it’s going to be different kinds of relationships, you know, and you’re not going to have a human-robot that makes you feel like a human-dog relationship. You know, it’s different.
Derek Mooney
But you’re taking it a stage further. What animals lack, which is what humans have, is the ability to communicate vocally, to be able to speak to each other and understand each other. And what you’re doing with these computers is you’re giving them that ability and that facility and that’s where you’ve taken this a stage further. Because we know that the dog can fetch the paper, the dog knows when you’re home, the dog can tell you when it wants to go for a walk because it looks at the door or it looks at the tap if it wants a drink of water.
Cynthia Breazeal
In many ways dogs are a lot smarter than these robots. I just got to; you know, give a call out to the dogs. Dogs are really smart.
Derek Mooney
But this is where you’re taking this that stage further because it’s going to lift its eyebrows when you lift your eyebrows as a dog does. A dog can look sad too, a dog can dream, this has been proven already.
Cynthia Breazeal
Dogs are very social animals so yeah.
Derek Mooney
So this has gone beyond that already from what I’ve seen on the screen. Anyway, is there somebody else up there? Yeah.
Question
Yeah, you said earlier about that you couldn’t do tests with humans. Like disable eyes and mouths and all that. Are you planning on doing that with robots to find out what makes people like robots, like if you take out the eyes would they like robots more?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, so I mean again if you look at the human-human psychological literature you know, that these cues such as eye contact and interpersonal distance and facial expressions all matter but we don’t know to what extent and how much. But, yeah, we’re starting to do a series of studies to kind of systematically vary those parameters and seeing how they impact people’s perception of us. And that’s going to be interesting not only for robot designers I think but also for people to think about, you know, the impact of these cues and kind of like how much, you know, impact they have on our perceptions. So, yeah.
Derek Mooney
Do you want to ask a question? Can we get a microphone down to, what’s your name? Philip wants to ask a question.
Question [Philip]
What subjects do people have to learn in school to become a robot scientist?
Derek Mooney
You were looking at the robot were you?
Cynthia Breazeal
You know, so if you look at the nature of work that I do. I mean clearly there’s a lot of technical aspects. There’s a lot of engineering, mathematics, science. But you’ll also notice there’s a lot of sort of performance sides of it too. So the fact that I collaborated with Stan Winston on the creation of Leonardo, that it’s facial expressions, it’s a way of expressing itself. I mean that could be speaking to classical animation and so forth. So, you know, all that you can know and learn is going to help you and inform your ideas and how you think about and understand these sorts of problems. And allow you to be creative and go beyond what’s been done in the past. So, I would never want to limit your curiosity in the subject matter that you’re passionate about or want to learn about. But certainly a lot of robot people are coming at it from a technical perspective. But you’re starting to see and especially in this area of human-robot interaction, psychologists are coming into it as well from the scientific affective in the case of like, you know, Stan’s stuff, he’s coming at it from an artistic perspective so I think all of these things, you know, play an important role of how the different perspectives and way of thinking about this sort of very rich space of possibilities.
Derek Mooney
Anybody else? This gentleman here. Thanks Philip.
Question [Mike]
My name’s Mike. I have a question about the mirroring effect because you mentioned mirroring a lot in the beginning of the presentation. And I was wondering because robots think using code of course so they get the stimuli and they react, then they learn. Have you tried for example copying Leonardo or like, you know, making a more advanced version of Leonardo sit in front of the less advanced version of Leonardo and try the more advanced robot to make him teach the less advanced robot?
Cynthia Breazeal
So we’re starting, I mean we have a very new project basically trying to look at that transfer question right now. So, and just, you know, not necessarily having a robot explicitly sort of do pedagogy to teach another robot but what can you transfer from one robot which might have a different embodiment even to another system. So, I mean there’s a lot of interesting hard problems in succeeding in doing that but we’re starting to look at these questions as well.
Derek Mooney
And when they start recognising their own images, robots?
Cynthia Breazeal
There are people who have actually already started doing that.
Derek Mooney
Really?
Cynthia Breazeal
Oh yeah. Recognising stuff in a mirror, sure.
Derek Mooney
That’s extraordinary stuff.
Cynthia Breazeal
Sure.
Derek Mooney
I know certainly when birds do it they attack.
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, well you know, it’s fascinating because in most species eye contact is viewed as an aggressive thing. It’s usually it’s like either you run because something’s going to eat you or it’s a kind of challenging-
Derek Mooney
Fight or flight.
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah or it’s a challenging sort of thing. I mean humans are, you know, we’re very different in that eye contact is seen as this kind of pro-social sort of things in many cases. Of course it doesn’t have to mean that but many, many, many species are very sensitive to at least being watched. And there’s a really good reason for that.
Derek Mooney
Anybody else? Up the back?
Question
Hi, sorry I was just interested in your, when you had the robot in the medical environment. I was just wondering would this kind of reflective or empathetic, you know, personality that’s being built up. Would you envisage their involvement becoming greater there? That maybe they could recognise distress or maybe they could collaborate?
Derek Mooney
You’re talking about in the hospital situation?
Question
Yeah, or in any medical environment. In an ambulance or something that they could collaborate with the medical professionals. We could do with some help in this country with our health care.
Derek Mooney
They couldn’t be any worse than some surgeons I’ve come across in my time.
Cynthia Breazeal
There’s a whole field that’s called affective computing that basically is looking at that; giving computers and machines the ability to perceive human affective states either through observable facial expressions, tone of voice but also through five physical sensing. And that’s really relevant in a lot of medical applications, it’s real relevant, you know, in the case of say, of people who are on autism spectrum disorder where in many cases they may have these very aroused internal states but they’re not expressing it through the same channels that we would expect from another person to see if you’re stressed out and so, you know, you hear examples of a teacher who is trying to teach someone something but they’re really stressed out and suddenly the person has an outburst. And they’re like, suddenly it was an outburst and it’s like what they’re telling you once they become maybe later in life verbal it was never a sudden outburst, it was like building and building and I didn’t know why you wouldn’t back off. And it’s just, you know, if you had systems that could interpret those signals and then have some, maybe an artefact, a robot or something that could communicate that so a person would understand what’s going on inside them. I think there’s a lot of applications for stuff like that. Medical, therapeutic, just communication, I think there’s a lot of interesting applications for stuff like that.
Derek Mooney
Including sensing danger. I mean robots already can sense danger.
Cynthia Breazeal
Sure.
Derek Mooney
Like the little warning device on the car – ‘You’re going to crash, stop, I’m telling you, I’m screaming at you, stop.’ Turn it off you crash, you made a mistake. Anybody else? Sorry, this lad down here. If we got a mic, please Liam. Or you could shout it out if you want.
Question
So when you have one intelligence learning from another intelligence, you have a robot say learning from a human, did you ever find that when you’re doing your experiments that the non-human intelligence did something quite intelligent but not just very human?
Cynthia Breazeal
Did something quite intelligent but not human.
Question
I mean something that humans might not actually think of doing but turns out to be quite intelligent.
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, you know, I think there are certainly examples of that so I’m going to talk about some different work.
Derek Mooney
That’s when you get worried. When it starts doing something you don’t expect.
Cynthia Breazeal
But there have been some really, you know, kind of funny stories you know, when people were doing a lot of work with genetic algorithms and they were these sort of virtual worlds and involving these kind of virtual creatures. And what they found was that sometimes these virtual creatures would find a bug in your code, could exploit some artefact if your virtual world might like you didn’t model gravity exactly right and would exploit that to be able to do the task. So I mean there are cases of, you know, when these systems learn and they find these irregularities. Sometimes they find stuff that you didn’t expect or predict and start using it. So, in the case of these virtual creatures in the sort of realm they would start using the violations of your laws of physics in order to solve the task of how to locate from point A to point B in really funny ways because it’s completely violating, yeah, what we know as the physical laws.
But I mean I think that’s certainly, it’s certainly possible, you know. If it can sense it, if it’s within its space of possibilities that it can search over and discover then yeah, you could expect it to find the things that might not necessarily be intuitive to us but you could take advantage of.
Derek Mooney
We’ll just take a couple more questions. So that man there.
Question
I’ve got one question but it’s sort of half been answered by all the other questions that have come before. The first half of your talk effectively was focused on psychology and the learning of how we learn because you had to learn that first to try and apply those rules to help your robots to learn. At some point have you got a measure of what it is to learn and can you get a way of measuring when your creations can learn on their own beyond yourself, what you’ve taught? Effectively, when will androids dream of electric sheep, to paraphrase a famous author. And what have you learned about yourself that you wouldn’t have thought of from what you’ve been working on?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, so I mean from the lot of the work that we’re doing I mean, so the one video I showed was Leo showing that, you know, when a person’s not nearby that he actually does have these internal drives to explore, has essentially this sort of curiosity drive to try to discover the things that are new so you know, if you look at, I mean, even Piaget, he talks about these multiple drives and motivations we have for learning. So we’re both attracted to novelty and we also have this sort of pleasure of mastering. Sort of a push ball motive so to speak to discover the thing you don’t know yet but also to master what’s familiar. And, you know, that’s basically a process that the robot’s engaging in, in that video. Now, that being said, children learn in all kinds of ways that this robot is not learning. And I think there’s still a lot we have to understand about how children learn.
So, you know, machine learning is this huge field of inquiry and the vast majority of that work is not inspired by how humans learn at all. It’s a lot of statistical kind of numbercrunching sort of things. And I mean there’s applications and there’s, you know, these are things that computers are good at and so it makes sense. I think a lot of the reason why we’re building robots in the way that we are is because we want them to learn from people. So if you look at these sort of machine learning techniques, if you understand the algorithms you can design the algorithm and kind of frame the whole problem. That the algorithm basically at that point just kind of turns its crank and out comes the result if you as the human designer were smart enough to structure that appropriately.
We’re looking at a very different problem which is someone who knows nothing about the underlying machine learning algorithms but has a lifetime of experience of teaching and learning from each other. What does that look like when you try to teach a machine? So that’s why we draw so much from how people learn because we’re trying to make this process intuitive for people and also effective that people bring so much insight and constraint and help basically to help people learn, to help children learn. You know, and the spatial scaffolding which is one example of this simple interaction that people automatically understand what the meaning of that is. Trying to design robots that can appreciate all of these cues that I threw up on the slide. I mean that’s a pretty daunting task. We’re kind of highlighting this, this one particular one.
Just appreciating that, you know, learning on your own even as people, we don’t do that, you know, if you leave an infant in a room alone they don’t learn. They can’t.
Derek Mooney
Would they explore?
Cynthia Breazeal
Well it depends how young, you know, and there’s cases of like the Romanian orphanages where the children were just basically given the kind of biological needs but they weren’t socially interactive so they grew up to be, just irrevocably, to be severely retarded. So appreciating that our mind goes through all these critical periods, I mean even these kinds of interactions and many of them are profoundly social interactions to develop normally. So the social is critical for a cognitive and continued social development as well. So, you know, the world is a really complicated place. I keep saying that but I think we need a lot of help beyond just our own exploration to make headway.
And that’s why, you know, ants basically don’t have to learn a lot in that they kind of are born, you know, with this certain knowledge and that’s what’s going to get them through their ant day. Humans are what is called an altricial species meaning that we go through a very long period of development where we are utterly dependent on our care givers because we need that time in order to learn and acquire these abilities through the interaction with others. So, again I think, you know, machines can learn in very inhuman, non-biological ways but I think it’s intriguing and potentially relates significant to build robots that can also learn in these more human inspired ways.
Derek Mooney
I think that’s to do with the lifespan though. I mean if you’re a human you’re not going to, you’re going to live longer than an ant, you’re going to live longer than a mayfly which lasts for a day. It comes up, it goes up, it gets mated with, it’s gone, it’s all over. So it only needs to know what it has to do for that moment if it even knows it. Humans have a much longer lifespan, so we have to do a lot more so it takes us a lot longer but we learn it and that’s how we get through it. But what about robots? How long, what’s the kind of lifespan or have you even thought about that?
Cynthia Breazeal
I think that’s one of the big questions. Is that right now, I mean the reality of it is, most robots, especially research robots, aren’t ‘on’ that long. You know, there’s manufacturing robots that are on 24x7 but they’re just doing the same thing again and again but learning robots, they’re on, you know, they don’t really go through, I think, a life cycle. And I think longterm interaction and longterm learning, I mean that’s a grand challenge in the field right now. Is how do you build a system that can go through these extended months, years types of interaction and really build and accumulate.
Derek Mooney
Because if you go into one room where the robot is kind of like this and then you go into another room where the robot is kind of like that. And that it’s different stages and if you’ve, depending on what your issue is that day or what the task is you say these robots are designed to help you fulfil your goals. I mean is it the baby one? Is it the kind of adolescent, is it the adult or is this one that you grow up with? Or that grows up with you or comes in readymade, already designed?
Cynthia Breazeal
Yeah, I think these are all, you know, very fair questions that I don’t think people, you know, know the answers to yet. But I think, certainly a grand challenge right now of robotics is looking at this longterm interaction and longterm learning because it really hasn’t been done yet.
Derek Mooney
Because if the baby is growing, Leonardo is teaching the kid in the room and ‘What did you learn today?’ ‘Well we learned this.’ And then does that robot grow as the baby grows?
Cynthia Breazeal
To build… absolutely. You know, people call, you know, the ability to scale, you know, to become more complex over time without losing ability. Because you can imagine these systems become much more complicated I mean they could just get unwieldy. I mean they could just, you know, there gets to be a point where you’re not constructively building upon things but it’s becoming, you know, too sort of you know, scattered.
Derek Mooney
Well it’s kind of there in the obesity one isn’t it? Because you say initially the conversation is more instructive and then as it gets to know you almost -
Cynthia Breazeal
So based on, right. So the robot is actually taking, I mean this is very different kind of, it’s not learning in the way that we’re talking about children or anything. It’s more of an adaptation. So everyday the robot as basically part of your interaction is asking you a couple of questions in some sense, that is trying to measure what’s the state of the relationship, meaning is the working alliance working? Do we feel like it’s going through disrepair? And then based on these measures it’s adapting the dialogue to either try to maintain the interaction or also just based on just a clock, an internal clock knowing how many times you’ve interacted with it. It has a measure; it has ways of basically computing how familiar are you with the robot. Knowing what it said to you in the past and sort of appreciating the past interactions in order to gauge what it should be saying now.
So when you talk about this life cycle and sort of relationships, I mean the thing that it’s bringing into it is time. You know, when you build a relationship with something you have a set of shared experiences, a whole history of past experiences that shape and inform what you do in the moment and shape and inform what you think about in the future. You know, and the weight management robots are really simple example of that. But, you know, we should think about scaling that to more complicated systems. I mean this idea of this longitude of relationship is a really fascinating question.
Derek Mooney
One last question.
Question
I’m just wondering how far we are from installation shown in the Bladerunner movie?
Cynthia Breazeal
In Bladerunner? So, you know, this is funny because you’re the third person who’s mentioned Bladerunner. And Bladerunner is a different technology. Bladerunner is genetic engineering and maybe eventually I’ll go to genetic engineering to do this kind of stuff but yeah, I mean it’s a different technology that people are using there. Yeah, so it is work that’s going on, it absolutely, genetic engineering is going on but it’s not my area of expertise and you know, I couldn’t even venture to guess, you know, how close we are to doing that. But, yeah that’s a science that’s advancing very rapidly.
Derek Mooney
Well Cynthia, on behalf of everybody here I’d like to thank you for a very informative presentation. You’ve got a fabulous mind and a fascinating imagination, a fantastic imagination I have to say. So let’s here it for Dr Cynthia Breazeal and thank you very much indeed for coming along.
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