- seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
Other social robots have been devel-
oped to study human-robot interactions
and bonding, as well as for potential
commercial exploitation. For example,
iCat is a small desktop cat-like robot
able to play games such as tic-tac-toe
(noughts and crosses) and to assume
different personality traits. aMuu is an
emotional robot designed to explore
the possibilities for future home robots;
Probo is an elephant-like head and torso
that is soft enough to hug; and KASPAR
is a child-sized humanoid robot with
movable head, arms, hands, and neck,
and silicon-rubber mask face, designed
to study gestures, facial expressions, syn-
chronisation with human behaviours,
and imitation. People happily touch, talk, and play games with these robots,
bringing emotionally embodied responsiveness into a realm where it has often
been thought lacking (Stuart, 2011). Indeed, elderly people with mild Alzheimer’s
disease seem to use more gestures and physical contact with a teleoperated
robot called Telenoid than they do with a human carer (Kuwamura, Nishio, and
Sato, 2016). None of these robots looks remotely convincing as a human, and so
they avoid the uncomfortable reaction that comes with a robot that is somehow
too uncannily close for comfort.You might jump to the obvious conclusion that the human provides all the real
meaning and the only source of consciousness in these interactions. You might
be confident that iCat, Probo, and KASPAR no more have relationships with you
than the cats and dogs some people let themselves believe care about them.
You might be sure these robots cannot be conscious because they’re just piles of
metal and fabrics with a set of simple routines, just as you might be confident that
the fish on your plate could not have been conscious because it had the wrong
neural architecture. But it is worth pausing first to note some similarities between
us and the social robots.Brooks says of Kismet, ‘There was no place that everything came together and
no place from which everything was disseminated for action’ (2002, p. 92). In‘we, all of us,
overanthropomorphize
humans, who are after
all mere machines’
(Brooks, 2002, p. 175)
FIGURE 12.17 • A variety of social robot heads (Ke ̨dzierski et al., 2013).FIGURE 12.18 • Cynthia Breazeal with Kismet,
the sociable robot. Kismet had
four colour video cameras,
an auditory system, motors
with 15 degrees of freedom
controlling face movements,
and a vocalisation system able
to communicate personality and
emotional quality.