Nicol, Till Malfunction Do Us Part. Predictions of Robotic Intimacy (2008).pdf

A S URVEY OF T ECHNOLOGY AND S OCIETY

become the de facto industry standard.

To build momentum, the company is

signing agreements with hospitals and

physician networks to use the Health

Vault system to upload and share their

patient medical records. If enough

patients, hospitals, and physicians

affiliate with Health Vault, Microsoft

could in time find itself in the same

dominant position in HIT that it has

held in personal computing and the

Internet for years (think Windows and

Internet Explorer).

But it’s a long way from here to there.

Not even Microsoft has the reach and

resources to finance a nationwide net-

work on its own if the participants are

unwilling and need compensation to

overcome their natural resistance. Over

the long run, an HIT system will be

built, maintained, and used efficiently

when physicians and hospitals have an

interest in using it in order to maintain

their market share. To get there will

require strengthening the normal sup-

plier-consumer relationship that works

so well to promote productivity and

improve quality in other markets. In

health care, a larger role for direct con-

sumer purchasing of services—instead

of the present near-total reliance on

third-party payments—is crucial. If

consumers begin paying for more med-

ical services with their own money,

they will be in a much stronger posi-

tion to demand the convenience and

higher quality associated with an effi-

cient and reliable electronic system of

recordkeeping and transactions.

The shift to more consumer-directed

financing, however, is not around the

corner. Low deductible employer-based

insurance and Medicare and Medicaid

are so dominant that it will take many

years before alternative arrangements,

like Health Savings Accounts, can have

a significant impact. HIT adoption is

therefore likely to remain an uphill

struggle for the foreseeable future,

necessitating an ongoing campaign of

cajoling and financial support from the

government to overcome the under-

standable if frustrating reluctance of

physicians and hospitals to pay for

an information system that produces

gains for the overall system but losses

for themselves.

—James C. Capretta is a fellow at the

Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is also

a policy and research consultant for health

industry clients.

Till Malfunction Do Us Part

Predictions of Robotic Intimacy

I n a recent issue of the journal

lonely. “People engage in a variety

of behaviors to alleviate the pain of

[social] disconnection,” the authors

write, including “inventing humanlike

agents in their environment to serve as

potential sources of connection.” This

W INTER 2008 ~ 125

Psychological Science , researchers

from the University of Chicago

and Harvard reported that people

are more likely to anthropomorphize

animals and gadgets when they are

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finding is hardly surprising, and is not

unrelated to one of the favorite objec-

tives of the budding consumer robotics

industry: manufacturing “companions”

for the isolated elderly.

Japan—the country with the world’s

highest percentage of elderly people

and lowest percentage of children—

has been at the forefront of this domes-

tic-robot trend. In 2005, Mitsubishi

released its “Wakamaru” robot to con-

siderable fanfare. The three-foot-tall

machine, its appearance something

like a yellow plastic snowman, was

designed to provide limited home care

to the aged. It can “recognize” up to

ten human faces, respond to voice

commands, deliver e-mail and weath-

er forecasts from the Internet, wheel

around after people in their homes, and

contact family members or health care

personnel when it detects a potential

problem with its ward.

Despite Mitsubishi’s high expec-

tations, the first batch of one hun-

dred Wakamaru did not sell well. At

$14,500 apiece, Mitsubishi received

only a few dozen orders, and then faced

cancellations and returns as purchas-

ers realized the robot couldn’t clean

or cook, or do much of anything.

Customers were amused to find the

machine unexpectedly “watching tele-

vision” or “dancing,” but were frustrat-

ed by its limited vocabulary and actual

capabilities. Production was called off

after three months, and the remaining

stock of Wakamaru now work as rent-

able receptionists—a common fate for

first-generation humanoid robots, too

expensive for the general market.

In the past decade, other robots

intended for the elderly made their

debuts in nursing homes, including

“Paro,” a furry, white, squawking baby

seal made and sold in Japan. In videos

viewable online, it is plain that nursing-

home residents, including those suffer-

ing from advanced Alzheimer’s, take

comfort in watching, touching, talking

to, singing at, and cleaning Paro. Like

the cats and dogs sometimes used in

therapy—but with less unpredictabil-

ity and mess—Paro’s robotic twitch-

ing and yelping seem to evoke a calm,

warm focus in depressed, lonely, and

ailing patients. Other robots provoke

similar reactions, like “My Real Baby,”

a robotic toy doll. “These are used

to soothe individuals,” according to a

2006 paper by three M.I.T. scholars:

The doll helps to quell the resi-

dent’s anxiety. After a period of

time (usually less than an hour),

[the nursing home director] will

return to the resident, take back

the doll, and return it to her

office. Often, when she takes the

doll back, its mouth is covered in

oatmeal, the result of a resident

attempting to feed it. The reason

that she takes the doll back, she

says, is that “caring” for the doll

becomes too much to handle for

the resident.

It is difficult to fault nursing home

directors who, out of compassion, offer

sad patients the comfort of interacting

with robotic toys. Other uses of today’s

interactive robots seem essentially

benign, too—like the use of “Nico”

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A S URVEY OF T ECHNOLOGY AND S OCIETY

and “KASPAR,” child-size humanoid

robots, as tools for the social training

of autistic children, or the employ-

ment of the industrious robotic guard

dragon “Banryu,” which prowls the

house smelling for smoke and looking

for intruders.

But some analysts predict that we

are nearing a day when human inter-

actions with robots will grow far more

intimate—an argument proffered in

its most exaggerated form in Love

and Sex with Robots , a new book that

contends that by the year 2050, people

will be marrying robots. The author,

David Levy, is a British artificial-intel-

ligence entrepreneur and the president

of the International Computer Games

Association. In the book, his Ph.D.

dissertation from the University of

Maastricht, Levy first explains why

people fall in love with one another—a

great and timeless mystery which, with

the aid of social scientific formulae and

calibrated ten-point checklists, he help-

fully distills into twenty-one illuminat-

ing pages. He then sets out to explain

why the blind rascal Cupid might have

as much success—or more—striking

passion between humans and machines.

With such astute observations as “‘like’

is a feeling for someone in whose pres-

ence we feel good,” Levy lays out the

potential for robots to exhibit “behav-

ior patterns” that will induce people to

fall for them, heart and soul:

this goal, such as suggesting a visit

to the ballet, cooking the human’s

favorite food, or making flattering

comments about the human’s new

haircut, then measuring the effect

of each strategy by conducting an

fMRI scan of the human’s brain.

When the scan shows a higher

measure of love from the human,

the robot would know that it had

hit upon a successful strategy.

When the scan corresponds to a

low level of love, the robot would

change strategies.

These made-to-order lovers, Levy

says, will look like movie stars, write

symphonies better than Mozart, pos-

sess a “superhuman-like conscious-

ness,” converse with almost-infinite

intelligence in any given language,

demonstrate surpassing sensitivity to

their owners’ every thought and need,

and at a moment’s notice will be “in

the mood.” Soon to be available for

purchase at a location near you, their

entire virtual existences will be devot-

ed to making even the most luckless

lover feel like a million bucks.

For those who desire absolute sub-

missiveness in a mate, robots, with

their admittedly “unsophisticated” per-

sonalities, will offer the logical solution

(assuming they are not subject to the

same technical frustrations and perver-

sities endemic to all other appliances).

But for those who feel the need for

za-za-zoom, the love-bots of the future

will be programmed to be feisty:

A robot who wants to engender

feelings of love from its human

might try all sorts of different

strategies in an attempt to achieve

Surprises add a spark to a relation-

ship, and it might therefore prove

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necessary to program robots with

a varying level of imperfection in

order to maximize their owner’s

relationship satisfaction....This

variable factor in the stability of a

robot’s personality and emotional

makeup is yet another of the char-

acteristics that can be specified

when ordering a robot and that

can be modified by its owner after

purchase. So whether it is mild

friction that you prefer or blazing

arguments on a regular basis, your

robot’s “friction” parameter can be

adjusted according to your wishes.

to form emotional connections with

them. “They certainly don’t have the

same feelings for you,” Whittaker says.

“They are not like little old ladies or

puppies. They are just machines.”

The very premise underlying the

discipline of sociable robotics, how-

ever, is that a machine can indeed

mean something more. Their develop-

ers capitalize on the natural sociability

of humans , our inborn inclinations to

empathize with, nurture, or confide in

something generating lifelike cues, to

create the illusion that a lump of wires,

bits, and code is sentient and friendly.

Take, for example, the famous case of

the cartoon-cute robot “Kismet” devel-

oped by Cynthia Breazeal at M.I.T. in

the 1990s. Breazeal designed Kismet

to interact with human beings by wig-

gling its eyebrows, ears, and mouth,

reasoning that if Kismet were treated

as a baby, it would develop like one.

As she put it in a 2003 interview with

the New York Times , “My insight for

Kismet was that human babies learn

because adults treat them as social

creatures who can learn; also babies

are raised in a friendly environment

with people. I hoped that if I built an

expressive robot that responded to

people, they might treat it in a similar

way to babies and the robot would learn

from that.” The Times reporter natu-

rally asked if Kismet ever learned from

people. Breazeal responded that as the

engineers learned more about the robot,

they were able to update its design

for more sophisticated interaction—a

“partnership for learning” supposedly

indicative of the emotional education

Levy admits to finding it a little

“scary” that robots “will be better

husbands, wives, and lovers than our

fellow human beings.” But in the end,

the superiority of machines at pitching

woo needn’t threaten humans: they

can be our mentors, our coaches, our

sex therapists—with programmable

patience, sympathy, and “humanlike

sensitivity.”

While Levy’s thesis is extreme

(and terribly silly), many of its criti-

cal assumptions are all too common.

It should go without saying that the

attachment a person has to any object,

from simple dolls to snazzy electron-

ics, says infinitely more about his psy-

chological makeup than the object’s.

Some roboticists are very clear on

this distinction: Carnegie Mellon

field robotics guru William “Red”

Whittaker, who has “fathered” (as writ-

er Lee Gutkind puts it in his 2007 book

Almost Human ) more than sixty robots,

advises his students and colleagues not

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A S URVEY OF T ECHNOLOGY AND S OCIETY

of Kismet, whose active participation

in that partnership is glaringly absent

from Breazeal’s account.

It is important, Breazeal emphasizes

in her published dissertation Designing

Sociable Robots , “for the robot to under-

stand its own self , so that it can socially

reason about itself in relation to others.”

Toward this goal of making conscious

robots, some researchers have select-

ed markers of self-understanding in

human psychological development, and

programmed their machines to achieve

those specific goals. For example, Nico,

the therapeutic baby bot, can identify

itself in a mirror. (Aside from human

beings, only elephants, apes, and dol-

phins show similar signs of self-recog-

nition.) Kismet’s successor, “Leo,” can

perform a complicated “theory of mind”

cooperation task that, on the surface,

appears equivalent to the psychological

development of a four- or five-year-old.

But these accomplishments, rather than

demonstrating an advanced awareness

of mind and self, are choreographed

with pattern recognition software,

which, though no small feat of coding

cleverness, has none of the significance

of a baby or an elephant investigating

himself in a mirror.

Still, many artificial intelligence (AI)

aficionados—including David Levy—

hold that the interior state or lack

thereof is not important; the outward

markers of intelligence should be suffi-

cient indicators of it. AI patriarch Alan

Turing famously proposed in 1950 a

test in which a machine would be

deemed intelligent if a human con-

versing with the machine and another

human cannot distinguish the two.

(The implications and flaws of Turing’s

test were unpacked at length in these

pages by Mark Halpern [“The Trouble

with the Turing Test,” Winter 2006].)

Levy submits that this test be applied

not just to machine intelligence but

also to emotions and other aspects of

personality: If a machine behaves as

though it has feelings, who’s to say

it doesn’t? Thus he predicts that by

the year 2025, robots will not only be

fully at home in the human emotional

spectrum, but will even “exhibit non-

human emotions that are peculiar to

robots”—an absurdly unserious claim.

(One robot frequently used in studies of

emotion simulation is “Feelix” the Lego

humanoid, designed to express five of

biological psychologist Paul Ekman’s

six “universal emotions.” Curiously, dis-

gust, the sixth emotion, was deliberate-

ly excluded from Feelix’s repertoire.)

When explicitly defended, all such

claims rest on the premise that human

feelings are themselves nothing but the

product of sophisticated biochemical

mechanics. From the perspective that

physiological processes and responses

to stimuli comprise our emotions, “real”

feeling is as available to robots as to liv-

ing beings. “Every person I meet is . . .

a machine—a big bag of skin full of

biomolecules interacting according to

describable and knowable rules,” says

Rodney Brooks, former director of the

M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,

in his 2002 book Flesh and Machines:

How Robots Will Change Us . “We, all

of us, overanthropomorphize humans,

who are after all mere machines.”

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