Artificial Emotions
When
Angelica Lim bakes macaroons, she has her own kitchen helper, Naoki. Her
assistant is only good at the repetitive tasks, like sifting flour, but he
makes the job more fun. Naoki is very cute, just under two feet tall. He’s
white, mostly, with blue highlights, and has speakers where his ears should be.
The little round circle of a mouth that gives him a surprised expression is
actually a camera, and his eyes are infrared receivers and transmitters.
“I
just love robots,” says Lim, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Intelligent
Science and Technology at Kyoto University in Japan. She uses the robot from
Aldebaran Robotics in Paris to explore how robots might express emotions and
interact with people. When Lim plays the flute, Naoki (the Japanese characters
of his name translate roughly to “more than a machine”) accompanies her
on the theremin or the egg shaker. She believes it won’t be too many years
before robotic companions share our homes and our lives.
Of course Naoki doesn’t get the jokes, or enjoy the music, or feel his mouth watering over the cookies. Though we might refer to a person-shaped robot as “him,” we know it’s just a collection of metal parts and circuit boards. When we yell at Siri or swear at our desktop, we don’t really believe they’re being deliberately obtuse. And they’re certainly not going to react to our frustration; machines don’t understand what we feel.
At least that’s what we’d like to believe. Having feelings, we usually assume, and the ability to read emotions in others, are human traits. We don’t expect machines to know what we’re thinking, and desperate Sarah Connor triumphs over the ultimate killing machine in . From Dr. McCoy condemning the unemotional Spock as a “green-blooded inhuman” in to moral reasoning that revolves around the unemotionality of criminals, we hold our emotions at the core of our identity.
