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Cute robots

The population of robots is growing, currently equalling that of a medium sized country, according to an enthusiastic presentation I recently had the opportunity to witness. It's not just those industrial robots, not even the weapons industry's metal bulldogs that may soon autonomously hunt down enemies in combat unless someone puts a leash on them, but cute little domestic assistants that make up a significant part of the growth.

The robotics researcher was working on the problem of how to design these assistants in a way that would make them not only acceptable, but pleasant to interact with. To that end, they should be made flexible enough to support a range of "personalities" and modes of interaction. One should be able to give the robot different names, with all the implicit associations of gender and age that comes with a name. Years of research on sound and emotion has provided the knowledge for easily simulating the prosodic contours we identify as sad, reluctant, happy, angry, and so on. Even a highly stylised speech synthesis is able to convey a sense of emotional state, which can be used in the design of a "robot personality."

As even this researcher realised, some people want to interact with humanised versions of robots, whereas others find that creepy and prefer to treat them as mechanic machines; hence both attitudes must be accommodated in the design. Because we're all going to have them around, whether we like it or not! That, of course, is the conclusion of someone who's career depends on an expanding houshold assistant market. There are absolutely tasks that call for robots, such as cleaning up toxic waste, but make no mistake, the industry will find uses for them in places where the benefits are scant. We should not just think of the quasi-ethics of behaving machines integrated into our social fabric, but there is also the ever-important question of the environmental impact from raw materials for electronic gadgets.

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