Why robots are getting cuter - Rise of the adorable machines
Source: theverge.com
[...]Breazeal, a former student of Rodney Brooks, has spent her career designing robots that interact with humans in a social manner. For Jibo, she decided to focus on form and movement instead of facial features. An animator on her team had the insight that human movement happens in arcs, whereas robots traditionally move rectilinearly, so they constructed Jibo out of three swiveling rings and topped it with a big, baby-schema style head. In lieu of a "face," it has a single eye that blinks sleepily to show you it’s paying attention. It’s cute like the Pixar lamp is cute, swinging its big head around with clumsy enthusiasm.Breazeal believes social robots will change the way we interact with technology, away from a tool-based relationship to one of partnership. "It’s a very different metaphor when it’s your partner," she says. People adapt themselves to their tools, she says, and right now those tools consist of menus and icons rather than gestures and language. "People don’t want to feel like a machine to interact with a machine," she says. "They want to feel like a person, so they love it when the technology feels like a human."
A cute bot can also get people to do things they normally wouldn’t. Alex Reben, an engineer turned artist and another alum of the MIT Media Lab, has been playing with the power of robotic cuteness ever since he designed Boxie for his master’s. Like HitchBot, Boxie used cuteness as an engineering workaround. Robots have a hard time climbing stairs, so Boxie asks humans to carry it up them. To get humans to go out of their way to help a machine, Reben made Boxie cute, combing through the literature to find the optimal proportions — wide eyes, big head, slight smile, childlike voice.
Boxie also asked people questions, and Reben found that people were surprisingly forthcoming. "We think we’ve gotten responses a human wouldn’t get," he says. He designed a new version, BlabDroid, to be strictly an interview robot, traveling the world asking people personal questions and filming their answers, which will be compiled in a documentary.
The tendency of people to treat minimally anthropomorphic bots as humans worries some people. We are, in a sense, falling prey to a powerful illusion. The expressions and gestures are shorthand for internal states you imagine, instinctively, are like yours, but really are only code. If a thing seems alive, if it looks cute, it’s triggering two responses evolved long before we could create simulated life. Not that that’s necessarily bad, but some worry it’s a power we don’t yet fully understand the implications of.
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Read the full article at: theverge.com
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