-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ------ On the Cybot Couch Do Androids Dream? Maybe not yet, but MIT is working on it. CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Dr. Anne Foerst, 34, a researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the director of M.I.T.'s God and Computers project, apologized on a recent afternoon that a certain robot named Kismet wouldn't be joining our interview. "Cynthia Breazeal, who built Kismet, is away in Japan right now and there's no getting her going," Dr. Foerst said in her German accent, "but you'd love her. She's oh so cute." A cute robot? Well, yes. At the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, engineers are trying to build robots with social skills and humanlike experiences, and so, as an experiment, they've created creatures that they think humans will relate to. Dr. Foerst, a Lutheran minister who supported herself by repairing computers during eight years of higher education in Germany, serves as theological adviser to the scientists building Kismet and the robot's brother, Cog. Q. What exactly do people do here at this laboratory? A. We are trying to build robots that are social and embodied. We have four projects. I am the theological adviser for two of them: the building of the humanoid machines, Cog and Kismet. Cog is a robot built in analogy to a human infant. He has a torso, two arms, a head, ears and eyes. He, it, learns to coordinate those limbs to explore its environment, just as newborn babies do. Kismet is a robot who interacts with humans through her body posture and facial expressions. The aim of this project is to explore social interactions between humans and robots and also between the humans themselves. Q. Why a theologian here in this particular laboratory? A. Two reasons. The first is when you build machines in analogy to humans, you make assumptions about humans. Theologians explore the cultural and spiritual dimensions of that very question, What does it mean to be human? The idea is that as these robots are built, we can use the wisdom of religious studies to enlarge our understanding of humans, and thus what you build into the humanoid machines. The other reason is that when we build social interactive robots that force people to treat them as if they were persons, tricky moral questions come up. For instance, Who are we, really? Are all our reactions actually developed in a very mechanistic, functionalist way? Or is there a dimension to social interaction that goes beyond that? What are ethics here? Why should I treat someone else like a human, with dignity, when it is just a mechanistic thing? For instance, one question we discuss quite frequently is, What would be the threshold when the robots are developed to a certain point that you couldn't switch them off anymore? The question really is, When does a creature deserve to be treated as intrinsically valuable? Q. When do you think a robot should be treated as intrinsically valuable? A. Well, that moment is 50 years down the road. At least. But it's pretty clear that when it comes, those who built the robot will have to make that decision because they won't be blinded by their fears of the seemingly human qualities of the machines. They'll know what's inside. And if it ever got to the point where the builders felt, Oops, now that has become something, the builders could become the creature's strongest advocates. Q. What make the robots Cog and Kismet different from previous ones? A. Previous attempts put very abstract features of human intelligence into a machine: chess playing, mathematical theorem-proving and natural language processing. The idea now is, In order for a machine to really be intelligent, it has to be embodied. We say intelligence cannot be abstracted from the body. We feel that the body — the way it moves, grows, digests food, gets older, all have an influence on how a person thinks. That's why we've built Cog and Kismet to have humanoid features. Cog moves and experiences the world the way someone who can walk upright might. He experiences balance problems, friction problems, weight, gravity, all the stuff that we do, so that he can have a body feeling that is similar to ours. The humanoid features are also crafted into the machines in order to trigger social responses from the people interacting with them. The other thing we believe is that humans are human because we are social. Thus, we try to treat Cog and Kismet something like the way most of us treat babies, as if they have intentionality, emotion, desires and intelligence. We give them as much social interaction as we can. Cog is a whole body and Kismet is mostly a head and facial expression. Our work with Cog concentrates more on the embodiment stuff and Kismet more on emotional-social learning. Q. Is the robot Kismet a she? A. Robots are its. But I can't help but think of her as a she. If you were to see Kismet, you would be taken by her enormously expressive face: long eyelashes, big blue eyes, movable brow, cute, kissy mouth. When Kismet puts her eyes on you and looks sad, you want to make her happy. Of course, part of you thinks, It's just a stupid machine. But you do react and you can't help it. The point of reacting to Kismet is the same as reacting to a baby. We believe that only when you treat the machines as if they have all these social cha racteristics, will they ever get them. If you want to have an intelligent being, you need to create that circle. So we react here to Kismet's emotional displays. When she's bored, you want to make her happy. When she seems scared, you back off. Q. Has the very social robot Kismet done anything yet that has astonished you? A. Kismet has not yet learned. Cog is the one who learns. A former graduate student, Matt Williamson, the guy who built Cog's arms, taught the robot how to control his arm. To coordinate the arms, Matt had to touch a part of Cog's body and then, the arm would touch that part, too. After he did that for the first time, Matt ran into my office and said, "You've got to come to look at this." It looked so eerily human. It's not so much that Cog does something that's unexpected, it's more the human reaction, like, it's alive! Q. People often talk about humans having some indefinable extra above life that makes for humanness — some call it "spirit." Can a robot have spirit? A. Rod calls it "juice." He says, "Even though I get it all right, might there not be some juice I'm missing?" I would say from a religious perspective, the juice is that which comes from the outside world and emerges in social interaction. Q. Some people might complain that in building humanoid robots, you are trying to supplant God. A. Yes. I know. They say, "Do you want to be like God?" Actually, if you use biology as your inspiration in your robot-building and focus on embodiment and environment, you get much more humble instead of arrogant. Suddenly, you realize that even the most brilliant robot that the most brilliant engineers have worked on for years and years is still dumber than an insect. Q. So, in your view, God is, as the Latin Americans say, the "intellectual author" of everything? A. No. The creative author. When we are creative, the power of creation is from God. Q. In the many plays, novels and movies about robots, the dramatic climax of the story always comes at moment when the machine achieves sentience. Why do you think that is? A. Well, I think it's the search to feel and to be treated like something more than the sum of the parts that's inherently dramatic. This is the moment when the robots start to participate in the all-too-human quest of what does it mean to be me? Q. In the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," HAL becomes a danger to humans once he's sentient. A. In "Frankenstein," too. But in both cases, there is an explanation. When you look at Frankenstein, he is never part of a community. His creator left him right away. The people hated him, feared him, ran away from him. The only person who ever loved him was a blind man who couldn't see what he looked like. Frankenstein was never treated as a valuable being, a person with dignity. He had to turn against the society that shunned him. Where should the goodness come from when he never experienced it himself? HAL is the same thing. And he's disembodied. There is no body with which to experience the world. I would even say that in such a setting a robot couldn't even become sentient. In the movie, HAL becomes sentient at some point and nobody notices. No one treats him properly and he's isolated and what happens? He becomes psychotic. Q. What's your favorite robot movie? A. "Blade Runner." I teach it in my classes. The robots have this absolute search for meaning, and when their quest is not taken seriously, it becomes fatal. The movie raises this wonderful question: how do humanoid creatures feel about having been created by us and how do they deal with their human-made limitations? The New York Times, November 7, 2000 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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