Category Archives: T – empathy

Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System

Now, a new study by a team of Japanese researchers shows that, in certain situations, children are actually horrible little brats may not be as empathetic towards robots as we’d previously thought, with gangs of unsupervised tykes repeatedly punching, kicking, and shaking a robot in a Japanese mall.

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Next, they designed an abuse-evading algorithm to help the robot avoid situations where tiny humans might gang up on it. Literally tiny humans: the robot is programmed to run away from people who are below a certain height and escape in the direction of taller people. When it encounters a human, the system calculates the probability of abuse based on interaction time, pedestrian density, and the presence of people above or below 1.4 meters (4 feet 6 inches) in height. If the robot is statistically in danger, it changes its course towards a more crowded area or a taller person. This ensures that an adult is there to intervene when one of the little brats decides to pound the robot’s head with a bottle (which only happened a couple times).

Ref: Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System – IEEE Spectrum

MACHINES TEACH HUMANS HOW TO FEEL USING NEUROFEEDBACK

 

Yet, some people, often as the result of traumatic experiences or neglect, don’t experience these fundamental social feelings normally. Could a machine teach them these quintessentially human responses? A thought-provoking Brazilian study recently published in PLoS One suggests it could.

Researchers at the D’Or Institute for Research and Education outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, performed functional MRI scans on healthy young adults while asking them to focus on past experience that epitomized feelings of non-sexual affection or pride of accomplishment. They set up a basic form of artificial intelligence to categorize, in real time, the fMRI readings as affection, pride or neither. They then showed the experiment group a graphic form of biofeedback to tell them whether their brain results were fully manifesting that feeling; the control group saw the meaningless graphics.

The results demonstrated that the machine-learning algorithms were able to detect complex emotions that stem from neurons in various parts of the cortex and sub-cortex, and the participants were able to hone their feelings based on the feedback, learning on command to light up all of those brain regions.

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Here we must pause to note that the experiment’s artificial intelligence system’s likeness to the “empathy box” in “Blade Runner” and the Philip K. Dick story on which it’s based did not escape the researchers. Yes, the system could potentially be used to subject a person’s inner feelings to interrogation by intrusive government bodies, which is really about as creepy as it gets. It could, to cite that other dystopian science fiction blockbuster, “Minority Report,” identify criminal tendencies and condemn people even before they commit crimes.

 

Ref: MACHINES TEACH HUMANS HOW TO FEEL USING NEUROFEEDBACK – SingularityHub

Unfair Advantages of Emotional Computing

Pepper is intended to babysit your kids and work the registers at retail stores. What’s really remarkable is that Pepper is designed to understand and respond to human emotion.

Heck, understanding human emotion is tough enough for most HUMANS.

There is a new field of “affect computing” coming your way that will give entrepreneurs and marketers a real unfair advantage. That’s what this note to you is about… It’s really very powerful, and something I’m thinking a lot about

Recent advances in the field of emotion tracking are about to give businesses an enormous unfair advantage.

Take Beyond Verbal, a start-up in Tel Aviv, for example. They’ve developed software that can detect 400 different variations of human “moods.” They are now integrating this software into call centers that can help a sales assistant understand and react to customer’s emotions in real time.

Better than that, the software itself can also pinpoint and influence how consumers make decisions.

 

Ref: UNFAIR ADVANTAGES OF EMOTIONAL COMPUTING – SingularityHub

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When I ask Sebastian Benthall, of UC Berkeley’s School of Information, this question—if he thinks contemporary A.I. could become sentimental—he tells me that in many ways, an emotional reaction from programs already does happen, we just don’t call it that yet. “Why does your GPS make mistakes? Why do search engines lead you in certain directions and not others? If this were an individual, we’d call these things biases, or sentiment. But that’s because we think of ourselves as one being, when really there are a lot of biological systems cooperating with each other, but sometimes, independent of each other. A.I. doesn’t see itself that way.”

 

Ref: Trying on the retro flesh – Omnireboot

Soldiers are Developing Relationships with Their Battlefield Robots

 

Robots are playing an ever-increasing role on the battlefield. As a consequence, soldiers are becoming attached to their robots, assigning names, gender — and even holding funerals when they’re destroyed. But could these emotional bonds affect outcomes in the war zone?

Through her interviews, she learned that soldiers often anthropomorphize their robots and feel empathy towards them. Many soldiers see their robots as extensions of themselves and are often frustrated with technical limitations or mechanical issues which they project onto themselves. Some operators can even tell who’s controlling a specific robot by watching the way it moves.

“They were very clear it was a tool, but at the same time, patterns in their responses indicated they sometimes interacted with the robots in ways similar to a human or pet,” Carpenter said.

Many of the soldiers she talked to named their robots, usually after a celebrity or current wife or girlfriend (never an ex). Some even painted the robot’s name on the side. Even so, the soldiers told Carpenter the chance of the robot being destroyed did not affect their decision-making over whether to send their robot into harm’s way.

Soldiers told Carpenter their first reaction to a robot being blown up was anger at losing an expensive piece of equipment, but some also described a feeling of loss.

“They would say they were angry when a robot became disabled because it is an important tool, but then they would add ‘poor little guy,’ or they’d say they had a funeral for it,” Carpenter said. “These robots are critical tools they maintain, rely on, and use daily. They are also tools that happen to move around and act as a stand-in for a team member, keeping Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel at a safer distance from harm.”

 

Ref: Soldiers are developing relationships with their battlefield robots – io9
Ref: Emotional attachment to robots could affect outcome on battlefield – University of Washington