Yet it is physical similarity, in the end, that may allow humans to respond to robots in kind. “Once you have a face at all,” Sidner says, “people expect to see certain kinds of information in that face. If they don’t, it seems weird, and that sense adds to the cognitive load of dealing with the robot.”
To make the transition—to handle our tools and climb our stairs—robots will have our height and weight, our hands and feet, our rhythm and gait. Soft, flexible bodies will help them navigate our world.
The history of computer graphics provides an object lesson: Once a representation gets halfway realistic, the market demands increasing levels of fidelity. Stopping short of perfection plunges the user into what is sometimes called “the uncanny valley,” the point at which the lack of realism gets distracting. This played out in the animated movie The Polar Express; the animation was almost totally realistic except for the characters’ eyes, a distraction remarked upon by almost every critic who weighed in.
The most difficult barrier to maintaining an emotional relationship with a robot could be the question of sincerity. Does this entity really care about me as a person, or is it just manipulating me to make me think it does? Efforts to clear the sincerity hurdle are just getting off the ground. Take the simplest question: How realistic—how humanlike—will robots have to be to be accepted as sincere? Nobody is sure, and roboticists are spreading their bets across a range of possibilities. Bandit II at the University of Southern California has a simple, cartoonlike face with only rudimentary feature mobility. MIT’s Leonardo has 32 facial features, corresponding to 32 mechanical muscle groups, and looks like a baby animal with big, mobile eyes and floppy, expressive ears. Kokoro’s Actroid DER has a very high level of realism, including arm and torso gesturing.
You often need to see the expression on a person’s face to know how to take what he or she is saying, as we all know from our struggles with faceless e-mail. But we might not need perfect realism to initiate real relationships. Bryce Huebner, an experimental philosopher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has found his human subjects are willing to accept the possibility that machines have “beliefs” and even feel pain, but only if those machines have a humanoid face. Huebner suspects that “if people are willing to accept attributions of pain, it might not be hard for them to accept that machines have other feelings, like hoping, wishing, dreaming, or fearing.” Of course realism, no matter how good, won’t be enough. Human beings look pretty realistic, and relationships between them go south all the time. The first International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships is being held this summer in the Netherlands. It will surely not be the last.
ROBOT LOVE
If humans come to accept emotional relationships with machines, it will add a new layer of complexity to our lives. Some experts see these new bonds as essentially nonthreatening. “I believe that humans will have individualized relationships with robots, but I would not go so far as to propose that they will supplant human relationships,” says Rod Grupen, a roboticist who works on human-robot interaction and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “There are lots of species on the planet that do not challenge the relationships we have with other humans,” he adds.
Indeed, psychologists like Sherry Turkle of MIT say robots will never replace other people because they lack a foundation in the common human life cycle. “We are born of mothers, we had fathers, we mature, we make decisions about generativity, we think about a next generation, we face our mortality,” Turkle says. “All of these imply a set of complex relationships charged with anxiety, joy, guilt, and passion. As human beings we are bound by our life trajectory.” In other words, lack of a common biology would impede the deepest of relationships between humans and machines.
Others predict true intimacy. David Levy, president of the International Computer Games Association, analyzes the hardest case of all in his book Love and Sex With Robots. His core point is that there is nothing that psychology knows about human relationships of any kind, including sexual ones, that precludes similar relationships with robots. Indeed, he argues, there is nothing that one can specify about the rewards of human relations that rules out robots’ delivering more of those rewards, whatever they are. Are you interested in a partner that knows a lot about sports? Easy to imagine a robot that can fit the bill. Or would you prefer one that knows nothing about sports but is eager to learn? Easy to imagine that, too.
Levy agrees there will always be something to keep humans interested in one another, but he does not name that “something,” and it is nowhere in his book. Perhaps it is just a pious wish. Whatever else Love and Sex With Robots does, it makes one wonder whether the human species might drive itself to extinction through dalliance with sex robots that unflinchingly fulfill every last erotic wish.
It might prove difficult to stay off that road. Embodiment theory suggests that if we want machines to perform at the highest levels, we will need to give them access to our lives and our world. The robot next door might be the heir to a fortune. It might drive a racy red convertible or be your chess partner or your friend.
Many of us will surely find all this creepy and foreboding, but better functionality has its own logic. At the very least the development of humanoid robots will transform one of our more characteristic drives—the need to know who and what we are at the core.
“At bottom, robotics is about us,” Grupen says. “It is the discipline of emulating our lives, of wondering how we work.” Still, as all engineers know, you never really understand something until you have built it; and if you can build it and it works as designed, you can be confident that you know something basic. Spagna’s cockroaches and Bongard’s robotic starfish are baby steps in that direction, with far more progress to come.
Whatever robotics does to the species, for better or worse, once robots take a human form, the old narratives about the mystery of our nature are likely to be transformed to their roots. We may have to learn how to live with understanding ourselves.
