Real Tech Support for Robotics

This paper proposes an alternate reading of the Creative Robotics agenda. It attempts to formulate a rational for robotics research in the arts that hold promise for delivering contributions to the broader question of coexistence between advanced information processing machines and human beings. 1 Role Models for Robots The role of robots in human society has been a contested question ever since Karl Čapek coined the term robot in his 1920 play RUR [Čapek 1920]. The dichotomy between the intelligent machine and unexpected consequences arising from (self) interpretation of its protocols continues into Sci-Fi novels, television series and film, leaving the marriage of super-intelligence and social behavior in machines unresolved. All robotics research inherits this quandary. Before robotics research extended to practical questions of interaction with humans, this problem remained fairly marginal. Technical advances and improvements in industrial production have made previously expensive sensing and actuation technologies affordable, and companies are eager to sell them to a willing audience. But once robots entered the home and the leisure sphere, through toy stores and online resources, the problem of robots amongst people began in earnest to play an important role. The robotics research community has actively engaged this question in recent years. The new field of Social Robotics [Fong et al 2002] investigates learning and imitation, gesture and natural language communication, emotion, and recognition of usually benign interaction and social behavior. Thus, social robots are usually designed as assistants, companions, or pets, in addition to the more traditional role of servants. As such, robots are designed with the intention that people might have “natural” exchanges with them, and the term natural is most often translated into robots that act like (some) people act and look like (some) people look. Since most humans are more comfortable interacting with their own kind, it is believed human beings would most readily accept the presence of a robot if it appeared as they do. The tradition of dolls, puppets and automata, together with the social robotics agenda have converged in the entertainment industry to cement the validity of familiarity in the design of robots. Whether it is a pet or a companion, an entertainment robot usually “looks like” what it is intended to be perceived as. The most decisive formulation of this hypothesis resulted in the class of humanoid robots. To date, however, even the very best attempts at artificial lifelikeness fall disappointingly short of life itself. 1.1 Post-Mimetic Robotics In the 1970s Masahiro Mori developed the principle of the Uncanny Valley. This principle states the following: As a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathetic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive. At this point the robot resembles a human, but differs from a human in slight but perceptable and cumulatively significant ways. Thenceforth, as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels. Some researchers have challenged this principle, while others have embraced it with certain caveats. Dautenhahn [Dautenhahn 2002], for example, argues that appearance is secondary to movement. Humanlikeness would need to be achieved on multiple levels simultaneously (appearance, motion, speech, behavior, etc) in order to be believable. The history of the (visual) arts might offer some unexpected guidance for researchers struggling with this question. Artists at the end of the 19th century radically departed from direct forms of representation once technologies that superceded human mimetic capabilities were in place. Photography irrevocably altered the role of painting, and film irrevocably altered and augmented the role of photography. In the course of the 20 century, a variety of conceptual, performative and socially engaged art agendas emerged that continued the non-mimetic approach. Even media that use established techniques of drawing and coloring, such as comics, usually achieve believability in character by deviating from common notions of realism, as Scott McCloud observes [Bolhafner 1994]. This observation is conceptually in synch with some of the more interesting new ideas in Artificial Intelligence research. Drescher [Drescher 1991] sees an engineering replica of a universal human learning mechanism as an intractable problem, and a rather useless one at that. Because thinking is always thinking about something – and that something is fundamentally different in the machine than in the human, the synthetic thinking of robots will be very different from our own. Consequently, we need not imitate our own thoughts in the machines we make. In the Believable Agents research community [Bates, Loyal, Reilly 1992], the notion of lifelikeness is also not equated with mimicry. Believable agents are the union of AI-based autonomous agents and the personality-rich, emotive characters that appear in the dramatic arts (e.g. theater, cinema). Believability is a term used by character artists to describe a property of compelling characters. Believability strives for internally consistent, lifelike and readable behavior in such a manner as to support an audience in suspending disbelief and entering the internal world of the character. This is not the same as realism. Characters are not simulations of people, exhibiting behavior indistinguishable from humans under some controlled laboratory condition. Rather, characters are abstractions of people, whose behavior, motivations, and internal life have been simplified and exaggerated in just such a way as to engage the audience [Mateas 2002]. For these and other reasons that will become apparent below I argue for intelligently designed robotic systems that are informed by the history in the arts and that do not strive for obvious similarity with humans. Furthermore I will expand the argument against mimesis and suggest a form of robot design outside of that which we would “normally expect” from a machine. 2 Querying the Role of Automation In “The Question Concerning Technology” Heidegger analyzes the reasons for his discomfort towards technology form the perspective of existential philosophy [Heidegger 1955]. He observes that automation technologies create a “standing reserve’” and that this standing reserve, while beneficial to economics, alienates people from their origins. Why worry about grinding grain when you can buy bread, cheaply, sliced and packaged, at your local food market. Heidegger might have argued that this efficiency has a price, and that the price is the difference between the lived experience of the complete cycle vs. the partial but practical experience of pre-prepared goods. Heidegger’s observations of second order effects of automation and efficiency on our psyche are useful here. When we build machines we make statements about the world. We make statements about things that should be changed, about materials that should be properly bent, finely grinded or cautiously heated up. When using computing machines, we implicitly make statements about data and the fact that the output of an operation does something useful to the input. Moreover, the effect of seeing these processes in action generates the belief that they produce something useful, that they truthfully interpret the data they collect and that, well, since it is so complicated, it is best left to the experts to decide how to go about these questions. But must all acts of automation result in such a standing reserve that removes one from original experiences? Must we always believe the experts who build and program the machines that surround us? 3 The Real Tech Support Initiative The real tech support initiative is an attempt to conceive, design and build robotic systems that actively address the challenges of the standing reserve by querying the processes inherent in creating efficient machines. Real tech support is a reinterpretation of the popular coinage “tech support” that we have become familiar with in our daily struggles with ailing machinery. Real tech support interprets the role of automation differently; not as culminating in efficiency and optimal design, but in the thoughts, hopes, illusions and fears that accompany the desire for technologically inspired improvements to the human condition. Under real tech support, philosophical and social considerations are included in the initial parameter set; they are to be addressed with the same level of dedication as the more clearly definable technical questions. A calendar utility designed for a handheld computer under the real tech support design philosophy might periodically remind a user not to work too much, for example. Machines devised under real tech support often perform no obviously useful work. However, these machines, critical robots, alter the flow of efficiency processes and replace them with situations and experiences that bring a person closer to an original experience. Since the real tech support initiative is interested in creating alternatives to efficiency driven automation, it must include in its agenda hard questions of reliability and robustness as standard engineering practices do. With this, critical robots under real tech support exceed the domain of traditional “robots for the arts”. Real tech support is, thus, a practical philosophy and a critical engineering practice at once. 3.1 Practical Examples of Critical Robots under the Real Tech Support Initiative The best way to show the kind of results this approach can achieve is to describe a few examples. The next section will describe four built and tested critical robot systems under the real t