From Hal to Kismet: Your Evolution Dollars at Work
���������������������by Steve Talbott
In Flesh and Machines Rodney Brooks writes that January 12, 1992,
marked "the most important imaginary event in my life".�On that day in the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey", the HAL 9000 computer was given life. Of course, HAL turns out to be a murdering psychopath, but for me there was little to regret in that.�Much more importantly HAL was an artificial intelligence that could interact with people as one of them....HAL was a being.�HAL was alive. Brooks, who directs the prestigious Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at
MIT, goes on to speak of his prot�g�e, Cynthia Breazeal:
��
All this occurs in a chapter entitled "It's 2001 Already" -- which may
rouse your curiosity about Kismet's abilities.� The robot's "body" is
nothing but a "head" mounted on a mobile platform.� Its dominant feature
consists of two realistic, naked eyeballs, which are accompanied by rough
indications of ears, eyebrows, and mouth.� These are all moved by small
motors. Brooks' response to this line of thought is to draw on a clich� of
artificial-intelligence literature:�he compares airplanes with birds.
Although planes do not fly in the manner of birds - they neither flap
their wings nor burn sugar in muscle tissue - we do not denigrate their
performance as a mere simulation of flying.�They really do fly.�So Brooks wonders, "Is our question about our robots having real emotions rather than just simulating having emotions the same sort of question as to whether both animals and airplanes fly?" "If it feels like one, it must be one" seems to be how the argument goes.
Not much interest in distinctions here.� Nor much timidity.� "Kismet is
not HAL", Brooks concedes, "but HAL [who could 'never be your friend'] was
not Kismet either.� Kismet gets at the essence of humanity and provides
that in a way that ordinary people can interact with it". Brooks could have risen above this na�vet� had he been willing to reckon
with the obvious distinction between artifact and artificer.� Yes, his
robots harbor intelligence, and yes, people respond to this intelligence
-- just as they respond to the intelligence in a printed text or in the
voice output of a radio loudspeaker.� In each of these cases we would
be crazy to ignore the meaning we are confronted with.� After all, just
as a vast amount of cultural and individual expression lies behind the
development of the alphabet and the printing of the text on the page,
so also a great deal of analysis and calculation lies behind the
formulation of the computational rules governing Kismet's actions.
To ignore Kismet would be to ignore all this coherently formulated
human intention.� We could not dismiss what humans have invested in
Kismet without dehumanizing ourselves. I'm glad Kismet taught Breazeal and her engineering colleagues that bodily
expression plays an important role in human communication.� But as for the
issue at hand:� her answer tells us nothing about any actual "partnership
for learning".� With an all too characteristic slippage between points of
view, she answers a question about Kismet's learning by citing only the
engineers' learning.� This would be all to the good if she could keep the
two perspectives distinct and get clear about them.� But the whole
enterprise depends upon confusion.� And so Breazeal concludes the
interview by mentioning that she is now working on a new robot, Leonardo.
But Kismet, who has been retired to the MIT museum, "isn't gone; it's just
now taking the next step in its own evolution through Leonardo". © Steve Talbott This article was originally distributed as part of NetFuture: http://www.netfuture.org. You may redistribute this article for noncommercial purposes, with this notice attached.On May 9, 2000, Cynthia delivered on the promise of HAL.� She defended her MIT Ph.D. thesis about a robot named Kismet, which uses vision and
�� speech as its main input, carries on conversations with people, and is
�� modeled on a developing infant.� Though not quite the centered, reliable personality that was portrayed by HAL, Kismet is the world's first robot that is truly sociable, that can interact with people on an equal basis, and which people accept as a humanoid creature ....
�� People, at least for a while, treat Kismet as another being.�Kismet is alive.�Or may as well be.�People treat it that way.
The Human Response
Kismet (who has been featured in virtually all the major journalistic
venues) is widely advertised as a sociable robot.� Brooks tells us that it
gets "lonely" or "bored" due to a set of "internal drives that over time
get larger and larger unless they are satiated".� These drives are
essentially counters that tabulate, in relation to time, the number of
interactions the robot has with moving things, or things with saturated
colors ("toys"), or things with skin colors ("people").
Kismet also has a "mood", which can be affected by the pitch variations in
the voices of people who address it.� Brooks speaks of the automaton as
being "aroused", "surprised", and "happy" or "unhappy" -- the emotional
state in each case being another name for a numerical parameter calculated
from the various environmental signals the robot's detectors are tuned
for.� Despite Brooks' easy references to conversation, Kismet is not
designed to reckon with the cognitive structure of speech, and its own
speech consists of nonsense syllables, pitch-varied to suggest emotion.
So the typical scenario has Kismet patrolling a hallway, detecting motion
(probably a person), and approaching the moving object.�Its detectors,
software, and motors are designed to enable it to make appropriate eye
contact and to engage in emotionally suggestive, if otherwise vacuous,
conversation.� First encounters with Kismet tend to be marked by surprise
(genuine, at least on the human side), which leads to all sorts of
interesting and peculiar human-robot interaction.
This, in turn, seems to provide the developers with great satisfaction;
if people respond to Kismet in some way as to a sentient creature, then
Kismet must somehow be a sentient creature -- "not quite" HAL, as Brooks
modestly allows, but apparently close enough for government (or MIT) work.
We are led back, then, to Brooks' observation that "Kismet is alive.� Or
may as well be.� People treat it that way".� This, as nearly as I can
tell, is just about the entire substance of his argument that robots are
living creatures.� He periodically acknowledges that his own robots
currently lack certain creaturely capacities, but, hell, people sure seem
to regard them as alive, so what's the difference?
How Do You Simulate Life?
At one point Brooks seems about to launch an inquiry into the reality of
the matter.� "It is all very well for a robot to simulate having
emotions", he writes,
And it is fairly easy to accept that the people building the robots have included models of emotions.�And it seems that some of today's robots and toys appear to have emotions.�However, I think most people would say that our robots do not really have emotions.
He seems reluctant to state his answer directly, but his argument
throughout Flesh and Machines makes it clear that he equates "life-
like" with "alive", even if that means, rather mysteriously, "alive in a
different way".� In speaking of Genghis, a primitive, insect-like robot,
he tells us that the software and power supply transform a "lifeless
collection of metal, wire, and electronics" into an "artificial creature":
It had a wasplike personality:�mindless determination.�But it had a
�� personality.�It chased and scrambled according to its will, not to the
�� whim of a human controller.�It acted like a creature, and to me and
� �others who saw it, it felt like a creature.�It was an artificial
�� creature.
The essence of humanity?� Brooks lives in a world of excruciating and
embarrassing na�vet� -- a world where a child's doll programmed to say
it is hungry somehow has genuine "wants" and "desires", and where a
robotic insect programmed to follow sources of infrared can be said to be
hunting "prey".� And if any unwelcome doubts should arise, they can be
dispelled by all those humans who react to the robots as if they harbored
intelligence and feelings.
Missing Authors
The problem we face with robots is that the text and voice have now been
placed in intimate relation with moving machinery that roughly mimicks the
human body.� And whereas the authors behind the words of book and radio
can easily be imagined as historically existent persons despite being less
concrete and more remote than face-to-face conversants, this is not the
case with the robot.� Here the authors have contrived a manner of
generating their speech involving numerous layers of mediating logic
behind which it is difficult to identify any particular speaker.
What, then, can we respond to, if not the active, gesticulating thing in
front of us -- even if the response is only one of annoyance?� The
speakers have vanished completely from sight, and yet here we are back in
an apparently face-to-face relationship! -- a relationship with something
that clearly is a bearer of intelligence.� Far easier to assign the
intelligence solely to the machine than to seek out the tortured pathway
from the true speakers to the speech we are witnessing.
This, incidentally, captures on a small scale the problem we face in
relating to the dictates of society as a whole.� Who is the speaker behind
this or that bureaucratic imperative?� It is often almost impossible to
say, so we are content to grumble about a personalized "System" that
begins to take on a machine-like face.� And the System is personal,
inasmuch as intentional human activity lies behind all its manifestations,
even if this activity has been reduced according to our own mechanizing
tendencies.� In other words, society itself is unsurprisingly assuming the
character of our technology.
None of this, however, excuses our failure to make obvious distinctions in
principle.� Yes, every human creation is invested with intelligence in one
form or another, and it would be pathological for us to ignore this fact
in our reactions.� But it is also pathological to fail to recognize the
asymetrical relation between artifact and artificer.� (This was the
primary point of "Intelligence and Its Artifacts" in NF #148, which was
actually begun as a response to Brooks' book.)
For all our difficulty in identifying the authors behind a computer's
output, we can hardly say that no authoring has gone on, or that the
distinction between the authors and the product of their authoring has
somehow been nullified.� Difficulty in tracing authorship does not by a
single degree elevate a printed page to the status of author in its own
right.� If Brooks wants to argue that Kismet, once spoken by its creators,
was somehow transformed from speech into speaker, he needs to make the
argument.� Instead he simply ignores the distinction in all its
obviousness.
Let me put it this way:� if Brooks acknowledges a difference in kind
between the intelligence of an author and that of a printed page, or
between the intelligence of an engineer and that of a doorbell circuit,
then he owes us an elucidation of how this distinction plays out in his
robots.� If there is something intrinsic to the idea of complexity or the
idea of moving parts that negates or overcomes the distinction --
something that transforms text into author, designed mechanism into
designer -- then we need to know what this something is.� What is the
principle of the transformation?
Learning from Kismet
In an interview with a New York Times reporter (June 10, 2003), Kismet's
creator, Cynthia Breazeal, remarks that "human babies learn because adults
treat them as social creatures who can learn".� Her hope for Kismet was
that "if I built an expressive robot that responded to people, they might
treat it in a similar way to babies and the robot would learn from that".
The Times reporter then asked the obvious question:� "Did your robot
Kismet ever learn much from people?"� This was Breazeal's answer:
�� From an engineering standpoint, Kismet got more sophisticated.�As we
�� continued to add more abilities to the robot, it could interact with people in richer ways.� And so, we learned a lot about how you could design a robot that communicated and responded to nonlinguistic cues; we learned how critical it got for more than language in an interaction - body language, gaze, physical responses, facial expressions. But I think we learned mostly about people from Kismet.�Until it, and another robot built here at MIT, Cog, most robotics had little to do with people.�Kismet's big triumph was that he was able to communicate a kind of emotion and sociability that humans did indeed respond to, in
�� kind.�The robot and the humans were in a kind of partnership for learning.
But what does this mean, "its own evolution"?� Presumably Kismet is
sitting on a shelf in the museum, or else moving about and pestering
visitors.� The one thing it's not busy doing is evolving.� That is the
engineers' task.� Apparently, the grotesque illogic of saying that Kismet
is evolving is a small matter for someone who has already managed to
convince herself that a handful of numerical parameters are signifiers of
emotion.
It seems to me profoundly significant that so many people today can
routinely characterize the engine rather than the engineer, the design
rather than the designer, the speech rather than the speaker, as the
subject of evolution.� Here is a refusal to face ourselves as creative
spirits or as anything more than machines, followed by a projection of our
missing selves onto our machines.� Such a refusal and projection can only
lead, not to the evolution of machines, but to the end of our own
evolution.
Related articles:
"Flesh and Machines: The Mere Assertions of Rodney Brooks" in NF #146:
�� http://www.netfuture.org/2003/Jun2403_146.html
"Intelligence and Its Artifacts" in NF #148:
�� http://www.netfuture.org/2003/Aug0503_148.html
See also the articles listed under "Artificial intelligence" in the NetFuture topical index:
�� http://www.netfuture.org/inx_topical_all.html
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