Science has a serious PR problem. It seems that for every group doing something kickass like exploding antimatter or building giant rockets, there's another group determined to do something so thick-glassesly nerdy they might as well steal their own lunch money. In this case it's a European initiative called LIREC - Living with Robots and Interactive Companions - and we're afraid
it's every bit as bad as it sounds.
Dreaming about a cool robot buddy is fine. Watching Star Wars to
see the King of All Robots, R2D2, is even better. But dedicating an
international study to "So, who wants to hang out with robots instead
of people" is where it gets worrying. The social shut-in building his
own best friend (or whatever) has been a fantasy since "Weird Science",
and while you might believe that humanity can do better than that with
artificial intelligences, remember: development is driven by the
market, and 90% of this internet you're using shows that said market is
for "men who would like women now, please". Be assured that future
advances in technology will pander to that.
It seems people can't wait to just stop talking to each other
altogether, with each new advance in human-machine interaction hailed
as the best thing since death-robot-lasered-bread. Most robot advances
so far have been useful, such as "people don't like building cars or
walking into minefields, how about we get the robots do that instead".
Human-robot psychology is a newer field, but at least where the
research has been suspicious - like recent headlines of "We can give
old people robots to play with instead of dealing with them ourselves"
- we can at least say it's heartless and efficient, not downright
pathetic. Unfortunately, research into "building someone to talk to"
cannot make the same claim.
It is, however, vital research. Robots like the Roomba have already
demonstrated just how powerfully humans can map realistic emotions and
feelings onto mechanical minds, even when that mind thinks nothing but
"move and eat dirt". Once robots are built to take advantage of this
anthropomorphisation it's a psychological minefield that we're going to
plow into full speed. It'd be nice to have a few warning signs set up
by researchers before we get there. Of course, we already know what
the overall road map is: "Robots do human bidding until they don't,
then they kill us all. Then they travel back in time looking very
Austrian."
At the end, these scientists get the last laugh. They're being
given thirteen million dollars to play with toys for four years,
including shiny ones like the Glowbots and - we kid you not - a robotic
dinosaur named the "Pleo". The last time we got to play for four years
was when we were born, and we're pretty sure our lego budget didn't run
to eight digits.
Posted by Luke McKinney.
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Link:
Living with Robots and Interactive Companions http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/103850.php
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