Week 3: Robotics + Art

The topic in this week’s discussion on robotics that most interested me is how humans emotionally understand and relate to robots. Specifically, I’m curious about how the presence and attributes of a robot’s face affect people’s perception of it. I’m aware that people use facial indicators to communicate an enormous amount of emotion (we’ve evolved to have 42 muscles in our face!). This is why most teams developing people-like robots (e.g. Dr. Kusahara’s work) invest so much time and resource into developing the robots’ facial structures and movements.

An illustration detailing some of the muscles in our face we use to express emotion.

Advancements in robots’ faces are critical to improving human-robot relations. For example, consider the notorious Uncanny Valley. As robots become more human-like, people tend to enjoy and empathize with them more - except for a sharp dip right before they become completely human-like. Despite all of our efforts at mimicking humans, we’re still unable to fully capture our face’s natural complexity. I think that escaping this valley will be the next big breakthrough in assimilating intelligent robotics into society.

An illustration of the Uncanny Valley showing the sharp decline, as well as examples of robots at different levels of anthropomorphism.

Whether a robot has or doesn’t have a face is also impactful. In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, an intelligent computer system named HAL disobeys human orders and kills astronauts in order to save himself from deactivation. As opposed to having a distinct body, HAL controls and occupies the entire spacecraft; I think that the lack of an anthropomorphic body for HAL prevents the astronauts from sooner guessing his intentions. I think that they would have been more wary if HAL was anthropomorphic because they would have more quickly realized that HAL can have creatively immoral thoughts just like people do.

A video clip of HAL murdering an astronaut that was planning to deactivate him.

Such discussions of robot-empathy are necessary to understand how society responds to the rapidly-increasing presence of robots (e.g. in industry). I think that our basic psychological inclinations can, and will, be leveraged (for good or evil) to make robots more or less appealing to us.

“2001: A Space Odyssey - Frank's Death (Movie Clip).” YouTube, YouTube, 28 Aug. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EEa5Rubm7E.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Germany, 1936.

Davis, Douglas. The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction. The MIT Press, 1995. Web.

“Full Page Reload.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/what-is-the-uncanny-valley.

Horstmann, Gernot. “What do facial expressions convey: feeling states, behavioral intentions, or action requests?.” Emotion (Washington, D.C.) vol. 3,2 (2003): 150-66. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.3.2.150

Mirrormedicine. “How Does Facial Reflexology Make You More Beautiful?” Wellness Unlocked, 30 Apr. 2017, wellnessunlocked.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/how-does-facial-reflexology-make-you-more-beautiful/.

Vesna, Victoria. "Professor Machiko Kusahara on japanese robotics." Lecture 3. CoLE DESMA 9. Web.

Welcome to the Uncanny Valley, www.umich.edu/~uncanny/.