Ants don't have friends: thoughts on socially intelligent agents

The question what is an agent? has been under dis cussion for many years. However, a consensus exists that the term 'agent' only makes sense in a multi-agent context - namely if there are at least two agents and assuming interaction and or communication between the agents. Agent research is generally done fairly independently in dfferent research areas, separated by the nature of the agents - natural or articial. This paper presents some thoughts on agency and sociality. Social intelligence is studied in the context of human style forms of social behaviour. Issues like embodiment, believability, rationality, social understanding,and different levels of social organisation and control are discussed

Chapter 13 Haptic Creatures

Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and emotion for use in mass-produced social robots. Robot producers and marketers reason that such robot companions can provide comfort, healing (iyashi), and intimacy in light of attenuating social bonds and increased socioeconomic stress characteristic of Japanese society since the collapse of the country’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. While many of these robots with so-called “artificial emotional intelligence” are equipped with rudimentary capacities to “read” predefined human emotion through such mechanisms as facial expression recognition, a new category of companion robots are more experimental. These robots do not interpret human emotion through affect-sensing software but rather invite human-robot interaction through affectively pleasing forms of haptic feedback. These new robots are called haptic creatures: robot companions designed to deliver a sense of comforting presence through a combination of animated movements and healing touch. Integrating historical analysis with ethnographic interviews with new users of these robots, and focusing in particular on the cat-like cushion robot Qoobo, this chapter argues that while companion robots are designed in part to understand specific human emotions, haptic creatures are created as experimental devices that can generate new and unexpected pleasures of affective care unique to human-robot relationships. It suggests that this distinction is critical for understanding and evaluating how corporations seek to use human-robot affect as a means to deliver care to consumers while also researching and building new markets for profit maximization

Eden Inverted: On the Wild Self and the Contraction of Consciousness

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and provide external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives

The Living Gesture and the Signifying Moment

Drawing from Peircean semiotics, from the Greek conception of phronesis, and from considerations of bodily awareness as a basis of reasonableness, I attempt to show how the living gesture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. Gestural bodily awareness, more than knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic consumption culture. It may be precisely these deep-rooted abilities for what I term “self-originated experience” that can ultimately offset automatism

On Evolution of God-Seeking Mind: An Inquiry Into Why Natural Selection Would Favor Imagination and Distortion of Sensory Experience

The earliest known products of human imagination appear to express a primordial concern and struggle with thoughts of dying and of death and mortality. I argue that the structures and processes of imagination evolved in that struggle, in response to debilitating anxieties and fearful states that would accompany an incipient awareness of mortality. Imagination evolved to find that which would make the nascent apprehension of death more bearable, to engage in a search for alternative perceptions of death: a search that was beyond the capability of the external senses. I argue that imagination evolved as flight and fight adaptations in response to debilitating fears that paralleled an emerging foreknowledge of death. Imagination, and symbolic language to express its perceptions, would eventually lead to religious behavior and the development of cultural supports. Although highly speculative, my argument draws on recent brain studies, and on anthropology, psychology, and linguistics

Factors of Emotion and Affect in Designing Interactive Virtual Characters

The Arts: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)This paper represents a review of literature concerning factors of affective interactive virtual character design. Affect and it's related concepts are defined followed by a detail of work being conducted in relevant areas such as design, animation, robotics. The intent of this review as to inform the author on overlapping concepts in fields related to affective design in order to apply these concepts interactive character development.A three-year embargo was granted for this item

Making Contact: A Neuro Eco Ed Art Inquiry Into Collective Healing Using The Culture Of Bees As A Lens To Look At Home

In this paper, I discussed 'making contact' as a way of connecting and transforming the perception of our individual and collective sense of 'place'. The premise was that, given the severity of climate change, and the complexity of collective, cultural change, we need a methodology and praxis that shifts the hierarchical societal schema to one that sees our fellow earthlings (animals, insects, plants) as our allies. I used arts-based methods of research and arts-based environmental education, combined with mindfulness meditation, to investigate becoming nature-based allies. Through this process, I hoped I could help myself and others to see the land as a 'place' filled with a multitude of varied, intelligent life forms, as opposed to a 'space' full of resources to use and discard. I did four community arts projects which used different mediums to investigate how we can belong, to ourselves and on the earth. I did this using bees as a metaphor for making our home on earth. Whether individually or communally, bees take on the responsibility of pollinating plants, thus ensuring that many beings may eat, live, and reproduce. These projects included an arts-based, environmental education lesson about bees; an environmental advocacy mockumentary about a mythical super bee in Maloca Garden; a series of outdoor, meditation and mask-making workshops; and a sculptural and sound installation of a human-sized beehive. I reflected on those four projects, and linked my reflections to the work of many diverse scholars who discussed themes of decolonization, imagination, community arts, education, meditation, storytelling and shamanism, in an attempt to show how these projects related to my idea of 'making contact'. The lessons that I learned were many and varied, including the immense need for quiet, meditative, arts-based spaces which help folks connect to their imagination, sense of wonder, and hope for the future of our planet

Children and Place: A Natural Connection

As environmental educators, our responsibility is to see that all children have opportunities to develop relationships with wild places right in their communities to develop this critical sense of place. Every community needs citizens of all ages who feel a connection to a creek, a meadow, a park, or a playground. It is especially important to remember the axiom of Baba Dioum, a Senegalese ecologist: "In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught" (www.cybernation.com). Aldo Leopold, one of America's premier conservationists, remarked, "Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation's character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us" (1990, 160-61). Leopold wrote for those of us who cannot live without wild things. In turn, we need to provide experiences for children of all ages who need wild things

Reflection as the Core of Supervision

Based on ou practice as supervisors over more than three decades, we have come to see and believe in the incalculable value of what we understand to be the value of reflection on ones practice