Nao: the robot that expresses and detects emotions - Telegraph

Quote:

The humanoid machine, called Nao, hunches its shoulders when it feels sad and raises its arms for a hug when it feels happy. It has been designed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child and is capable of forming bonds with people who treat it with kindness. Nao is able to detect human emotions through a series of non-verbal “clues”, such as body-language and facial expressions, and becomes more adept at reading a person’s mood through prolonged interaction. It uses video cameras to detect how close a person comes and sensors to work out how tactile they are. The wiring of the robot's “brain”, designed to mirror the neural network of the human mind, allows it to remember its interactions with different people and memorise their faces. This understanding, along with a set of basic rules about what is “good” and “bad” for it, allow the robot to indicate whether it is “sad” or “happy”. The actions used to display each emotion are preprogrammed but Nao decides by itself which feeling to display, and when. "We're modelling the first years of life," said Lola Cañamero, a computer scientist at the University of Hertfordshire who led the project to create Nao's emotions. "We are working on non-verbal cues and the emotions are revealed through physical postures, gestures and movements of the body rather than facial or verbal expression." Cañamero believes that robots will act as human companions in future. "Those responses make a huge difference for people to be able to interact naturally with a robot," she said. “If people can behave naturally around their robot companions, robots will be better-accepted as they become more common in our lives." Nao was developed as part of a project called Feelix Growing, funded by the European commission. Though some scientists believe that robots could be used to help around the house, or to care for the elderly, in the future, others have warned that the humanoids could spin out of control and attack their owners by accident.

“If people can behave naturally around their robot companions, robots will be better-accepted as they become more common in our lives."

To test the veracity of this statement, imagine you're an old, housebound guy. What would you rather have looking after you:

A. Mechanical gadgets?
B. Creepy fake emoting quasi-human slave entities?

I have no idea how anyone who had human emotions themselves could possibly think that they would ever be a selling point in robots.

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Erm, i'd go for option B, just sayin'

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What happens when it starts moving towards obsolescence? You start glancing sideways at it each time you notice some inefficiency, and of course it notices you noticing. It tries to do a better job, but you can see the simulated guilt, sadness and fear in its little electronic eyes. Finally the day comes, it's so slow and creaky now and besides, there's a new model out and you've got the money saved up. Today they're collecting the bins. Of course, you know it's ony electronic and you're stupid to feel bad about this, but you still try to do it tactfully; sneaking up behind it while it's doing its best to wash the dishes and reaching for the off switch. Suddenly it turns round and sees you. You both freeze.
"Please. I'm sorry."

You're sick, buddy.

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Well, presumably if we get to the stage where we have house robots we will be able to transfers the 'soul' of the robot into a hard-drive and transfer than into the new hardware when it comes along.

Also people do much the same (and also much worse) to their pets, but I guess because they can't say "Please, I'm sorry" it's not seen as sick and that's before you go into the countless animals that are slaughtered day-on-day so we cam feast on their flesh.

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But this isn't talking about robots that actually have emotions or personalities, they just fake them (what's the difference?).

And I think that the pet analogy is a good one. No one actually enjoys killing their pet, but they do it anyway. All the moe reason not to bring more of this into the world.

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Originally Posted by Noir

that's before you go into the countless animals that are slaughtered day-on-day so we can feast on their flesh.

1- As nature intended (although we do do eat too many animal proteins)
2- Farm animals are NOT pets.

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Originally Posted by Zichao

What happens when it starts moving towards obsolescence? You start glancing sideways at it each time you notice some inefficiency, and of course it notices you noticing. It tries to do a better job, but you can see the simulated guilt, sadness and fear in its little electronic eyes. Finally the day comes, it's so slow and creaky now and besides, there's a new model out and you've got the money saved up. Today they're collecting the bins. Of course, you know it's ony electronic and you're stupid to feel bad about this, but you still try to do it tactfully; sneaking up behind it while it's doing its best to wash the dishes and reaching for the off switch. Suddenly it turns round and sees you. You both freeze. "Please. I'm sorry." You're sick, buddy.

There's probably a nice creepy short story in there, if you cared...

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Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

1- As nature intended (although we do do eat too many animal proteins) 2- Farm animals are NOT pets.

Mkay, so when someone gets a deadly virus that would kill them without man-made drugs should we just standly idly by and let them die as nature intended? As smart creatures we cann do, and do do, many things that are not as nature intended, so that is no arguement for eating animal flesh.

And okay, they are not pets, but they are animals with emotions ect, I think that's more important than any legal label we may apply to them.

Buuuut I don't wana hijack the thread with animal rights issues. I still think emotobots are a cool idea :3nod:

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I'm with you on the animal thing (every time someone tries to inform me that "eating meat is something we've evolved to do over thousands of years" I reply that you can say the same thing about premature ejactulation and is he also strongly in favour of that?), but why are you in favour of putting robots through exactly the same thing?

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Originally Posted by Zichao

I'm with you on the animal thing (every time someone tries to inform me that "eating meat is something we've evolved to do over thousands of years" I reply that you can say the same thing about premature ejactulation and is he also strongly in favour of that?), but why are you in favour of putting robots through exactly the same thing?

but I don't think it will be exactly the same thing, for the simple reason that everything that the robot thinks/feels is held in a 0's and 1's, all you'd need to is transfers those to the new hardware. It won't even really be a clone or a copy of your old robot because it'll be *exactly* the same. From that I can imagine that the robot would be excited to be upgraded and look forward to it's new shell

It does raise other interesting questions though, like, could you mentally abuse one of the robots, are you responsable for it's simulated unhappiness ect.

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