Should we be thinking about sex robots?

The chapter introduces the edited collection Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications. It proposes a definition of the term 'sex robot' and examines some current prototype models. It also considers the three main ethical questions one can ask about sex robots: (i) do they benefit/harm the user? (ii) do they benefit/harm society? or (iii) do they benefit/harm the robot

How do you Play with a Robotic Toy Animal? A long-term study of Pleo

Pleo is one of the more advanced interactive toys currently available for the home market, taking the form of a robotic dinosaur. We present an exploratory study of how it was interacted with and reflected upon in the homes of six families during 2 to 10 months. Our analysis emphasizes a discrepancy between the participants’ initial desires to borrow a Pleo and what they reported later on about their actual experiences. Further, the data suggests an apparent tension between participants expecting the robot to work as a ‘toy’ while making consistent comparisons with real pet animals. We end by discussing a series of implications for design of this category of toys, in order to better maintain interest and engagement over time

The 1990 progress report and future plans

This document describes the progress and plans of the Artificial Intelligence Research Branch (RIA) at ARC in 1990. Activities span a range from basic scientific research to engineering development and to fielded NASA applications, particularly those applications that are enabled by basic research carried out at RIA. Work is conducted in-house and through collaborative partners in academia and industry. Our major focus is on a limited number of research themes with a dual commitment to technical excellence and proven applicability to NASA short, medium, and long-term problems. RIA acts as the Agency's lead organization for research aspects of artificial intelligence, working closely with a second research laboratory at JPL and AI applications groups at all NASA centers

The perception of emotion in artificial agents

Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents

Designing Women: Essentializing Femininity in AI Linguistics

Since the eighties, feminists have considered technology a force capable of subverting sexism because of technology’s ability to produce unbiased logic. Most famously, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” posits that the cyborg has the inherent capability to transcend gender because of its removal from social construct and lack of loyalty to the natural world. But while humanoids and artificial intelligence have been imagined as inherently subversive to gender, current artificial intelligence perpetuates gender divides in labor and language as their programmers imbue them with traits considered “feminine.” A majority of 21st century AI and humanoids are programmed to fit female stereotypes as they fulfill emotional labor and perform pink-collar tasks, whether through roles as therapists, query-fillers, or companions. This paper examines four specific chat-based AI --ELIZA, XiaoIce, Sophia, and Erica-- and examines how their feminine linguistic patterns are used to maintain the illusion of emotional understanding in regards to the tasks that they perform. Overall, chat-based AI fails to subvert gender roles, as feminine AI are relegated to the realm of emotional intelligence and labor

Flora robotica -- An Architectural System Combining Living Natural Plants and Distributed Robots

Key to our project flora robotica is the idea of creating a bio-hybrid system of tightly coupled natural plants and distributed robots to grow architectural artifacts and spaces. Our motivation with this ground research project is to lay a principled foundation towards the design and implementation of living architectural systems that provide functionalities beyond those of orthodox building practice, such as self-repair, material accumulation and self-organization. Plants and robots work together to create a living organism that is inhabited by human beings. User-defined design objectives help to steer the directional growth of the plants, but also the system's interactions with its inhabitants determine locations where growth is prohibited or desired (e.g., partitions, windows, occupiable space). We report our plant species selection process and aspects of living architecture. A leitmotif of our project is the rich concept of braiding: braids are produced by robots from continuous material and serve as both scaffolds and initial architectural artifacts before plants take over and grow the desired architecture. We use light and hormones as attraction stimuli and far-red light as repelling stimulus to influence the plants. Applied sensors range from simple proximity sensing to detect the presence of plants to sophisticated sensing technology, such as electrophysiology and measurements of sap flow. We conclude by discussing our anticipated final demonstrator that integrates key features of flora robotica, such as the continuous growth process of architectural artifacts and self-repair of living architecture.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure

Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. We call this basic strategy of self-guided learning the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. In this essay, we (a) argue that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) detail the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describe specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outline both short-term and long-term research agendas

Robot pain: a speculative review of its functions

Given the scarce bibliography dealing explicitly with robot pain, this chapter has enriched its review with related research works about robot behaviours and capacities in which pain could play a role. It is shown that all such roles ¿ranging from punishment to intrinsic motivation and planning knowledge¿ can be formulated within the unified framework of reinforcement learning.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Natural language generation for social robotics: Opportunities and challenges

In the increasingly popular and diverse research area of social robotics, the primary goal is to develop robot agents that exhibit socially intelligent behaviour while interacting in a face-to-face context with human partners. An important aspect of face-to-face social conversation is fluent, flexible linguistic interaction: as Bavelas et al. [1] point out, face-to-face dialogue is both the basic form of human communication and the richest and most flexible, combining unrestricted verbal expression with meaningful non-verbal acts such as gestures and facial displays, along with instantaneous, continuous collaboration between the speaker and the listener. In practice, however, most developers of social robots tend not to use the full possibilities of the unrestricted verbal expression afforded by face-to-face conversation; instead, they generally tend to employ relatively simplistic processes for choosing the words for their robots to say. This contrasts with the work carried out Natural Language Generation (NLG), the field of computational linguistics devoted to the automated production of high-quality linguistic content: while this research area is also an active one, in general most effort in NLG is focussed on producing high-quality written text. This article summarises the state-of-the-art in the two individual research areas of social robotics and natural language generation. It then discusses the reasons why so few current social robots make use of more sophisticated generation techniques. Finally, an approach is proposed to bringing some aspects of NLG into social robotics, concentrating on techniques and tools that are most appropriate to the needs of socially interactive robots