Emotional Design (24 page)

The role of emotion in advanced intelligence is a standard theme of science fiction. Thus, two of the characters from the
Star Trek
television shows and films wrestle with the role of emotion and intelligence. The first, Spock, whose mother is human but whose father is Vulcan, has essentially no emotions, giving the story writers wonderful opportunities to pit Spock's pure reason against Captain Kirk's human emotions. Similarly, in the later series, Lieutenant Commander Data is pure android, completely artificial, and his lack of emotion provides similar fodder for the writers, although several episodes tinker with the possibility of adding an “emotion chip” into Data, as if emotion were a separate section of the brain that could be added or subtracted at will. But although the series is fiction, the writers did their homework well: their portrayal of the role of emotion in decision making and social interaction is reasonable enough that the psychologists Robert Sekuler and Randolph Blake found them excellent examples of the phenomena, appropriate for teaching introductory psychology. In their book,
Star Trek on the Brain
, they used numerous examples from the
Star Trek
series to illustrate the role of emotion in behavior (among other topics).

How will my toaster ever get better, making toast the way I prefer, unless it has some pride? Machines will not be smart and sensible until
they have both intelligence and emotions. Emotions enable us to translate intelligence into action.

Without pride in the quality of our actions, why would we endeavor to do better? The positive emotions are of critical importance to learning, to maintaining our curiosity about the world. Negative emotions may keep us from danger, but it is positive emotions that make living worthwhile, that guide us to the good things in life, that reward our successes, and that make us strive to be better.

Pure reason doesn't always suffice. What happens when there isn't enough information? How do we decide which course of action to take when there is risk, so that the possibility of harm has to be balanced against the emotional gain of success? This is where emotions play a critical role and where humans who have had neurological damage to their emotional systems falter. In the movie
2001
, the astronaut Dave risks his life in order to recover the dead body of his fellow astronaut. Logically this doesn't make much sense, but in terms of a long history of human society, it is of great importance. Indeed, this tendency of people to risk many lives in the effort to rescue a few—or even to retrieve the dead—is a constant theme in both our real lives and our fictional ones, in literature, theater, and film.

Robots will need something akin to emotion in order to make these complex decisions. Will that walkway hold the robot's weight? Is there some danger lurking behind the post? These decisions require going beyond perceptual information to use experience and general knowledge to make inferences about the world and then to use the emotional system to help assess the situation and move toward action. With just pure logic, we could spend all day frozen in place, unable to move as we think through all the possible things that could go wrong—as happens to some emotionally impaired people. To make these decisions we need emotions: robots will, too.

Rich, layered systems of affect akin to that of people are not yet a part of our machines, but some day they will be. Mind you, the affect required is not necessarily a copy of humans'. Instead, what is needed is an affective system tuned to the needs of the system. Robots should
be concerned about dangers that might befall them, many of which are common to people and animals, and some of which are unique to robots. They need to avoid falling down stairs or off of other edges, so they should have fear of heights. They should get fatigued, so they do not wear themselves out and become low on energy (hungry?) before recharging their battery. They don't have to eat or use a toilet, but they do need to be serviced periodically: oil their joints, replace worn parts, and so on. They don't have to worry about cleanliness and sanitation, but they do need to pay attention to dirt that might get into their moving parts, dust and dirt on their television lenses, and computer viruses that might interfere with their functioning. The affect that robots require will be both similar to and very different from that of people.

Even though machine designers may have never considered that they were building affect or emotion into their machines, they have built in safety and survival systems. Some of these are like the visceral level of people: simple, fast-acting circuits that detect possible danger and react accordingly. In other words, survival has already been a part of most machine design. Many devices have fuses, so that if they suddenly draw more electric current than normal, the fuse or circuit breaker opens the electrical circuit, preventing the machine from damaging itself (and, along the way, preventing it from damaging us or the environment). Similarly, some computers have non-interruptible power supplies, so that if the electric power fails, they quickly and immediately switch to battery power. The battery gives them time to shut down in an orderly and graceful fashion, saving all their data and sending notices to human operators. Some equipment has temperature or water-level sensors. Some detect the presence of people and refuse to operate whenever someone is in a proscribed zone. Existing robots and other mobile systems already have sensors and visual systems that prevent them from hitting people and other objects or falling down stairs. So simple safety and survival is already a part of many designs.

In people and animals, the impact of the visceral system doesn't cease with an initial response. The visceral level signals higher levels
of processing to try to determine the causes of the problem and to determine an effective response. Machines should do the same.

Any system that is autonomous—that is intended to exist by itself, without a caretaker always guiding it—continually has to decide which of many possible activities to do. In technical terms, it needs a scheduling system. Even people have difficulty with this task. If we are working hard to finish an important task, when should we take a break to eat, sleep, or to do some other activity that is perhaps required of us but not nearly so urgent? How do we fit the many activities that have to be done into the limited hours of the day, knowing when to put one aside, when not to? Which is more important: The critical proposal due tomorrow morning or planning a family birthday celebration? These are difficult problems that no machine today can even contemplate but that people face every day. These are precisely the sorts of decision-making and control problems for which the emotional system is so helpful.

Many machines are designed to work even though individual components may fail. This behavior is critical in safety-related systems, such as airplanes and nuclear power reactors, and very valuable in systems that are performing critical operations, such as some computer systems, hospitals, and anything dealing with the vital infrastructure of society. But what happens when a component fails and the automatic backups take over? Here is where the affective system would be useful.

The component failure should be detected at the visceral level and used to trigger an alert: in essence, the system would become “anxious.” The result of this increased anxiety should be to cause the machine to act more conservatively, perhaps slowing down or postponing non-critical jobs. In other words, why shouldn't machines behave like people who have become anxious? They would be cautious even while attempting to remove the cause of anxiety. With people, behavior becomes more focused until the cause and an appropriate response are determined. Whatever the response for machine systems, some change in normal behavior is required.

Animals and humans have developed sophisticated mechanisms for surviving in an unpredictable, dynamic world, coupling the appraisals and evaluations of affect to methods for modulating the overall system. The result is increased robustness and error tolerance. Our artificial systems would do well to learn from their example.

Suppose we wish to build a robot capable of living in the home, wandering about, fitting comfortably into the family—what would it do? When asked this question, most people first think of handing over their daily chores. The robot should be a servant, cleaning the house, taking care of the chores. Everyone seems to want a robot that will do the dishes or the laundry. Actually, today's dishwashers and clothes washers and dryers could be considered to be very simple, specialpurpose robots, but what people really have in mind is something that will go around the house and collect the dirty dishes and clothes, sort and wash them, and then put them back to their proper places—after, of course, pressing and folding the clean clothes. All of these tasks are quite difficult, beyond the capabilities of the first few generations of robots.

Today, robots are not yet household objects. They show up in science fairs and factory floors, search-and-rescue missions, and other specialized events. But this will change. Sony has announced this to be the decade of the robot, and even if Sony is too optimistic, I do predict that robots will blossom forth during the first half of the twenty-first century.

FIGURE 6.2a and b

Figure a, ER2 , a prototype of a home robot from Evolution Robotics. Figure b, Sony's Aibo, a pet robot dog.

Robots will take many forms. I can imagine a family of robot appliances in the kitchen—refrigerator, pantry, coffeemaker, cooking, and dishwasher robots—all configured to communicate with one another and to transfer food, dishes, and utensils back and forth. The home servant robot wanders about, picking up dirty dishes, delivering them to the dishwasher robot. The dishwasher, in turn, delivers clean dishes and utensils to the robot pantry, which stores them until needed by person or robot. The pantry, refrigerator, and cooking robots work smoothly to prepare the day's menu and, finally, place the completed meal onto dishes provided by the pantry robot.

Some robots will take care of children by playing with them, reading to them, singing songs. Educational toys are already doing this, and the sophisticated robot could act as a powerful tutor, starting with the alphabet, reading, and arithmetic, but soon expanding to almost any topic. Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel,
The Diamond Age,
does a superb job of showing how an interactive book,
The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer,
can take over the entire education of young girls from age four through adulthood. The illustrated primer is still some time in the future, but more limited tutors are already in existence. In addition to education, some robots will do household chores: vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning up. Eventually their range of abilities will expand. Some may end up being built into homes or furniture. Some will be mobile, capable of wandering about on their own.

These developments will require a coevolutionary process of adaptation for both people and devices. This is common with our technologies: we reconfigure the way we live and work to make things possible for our machines to function. The most dramatic coevolution is the automobile system, for which we have altered our homes to include garages and driveways sized and equipped for the automobile, and built a massive worldwide highway system, traffic signaling systems, pedestrian passageways, and huge parking lots. Homes, too, have been transformed to accommodate the multiple wires and pipes of the everincreasing infrastructure of modern life: hot and cold water, waste return, air vents to the roof, heating and cooling ducts, electricity, telephone, television, internet and home computer and entertainment networks. Doors have to be wide enough for our furniture, and many homes have to accommodate wheelchairs and people using walkers. Just as we have accommodated the home for all these changes, I expect modification to accommodate robots. Slow modification, to be sure, but as robots increase in usefulness, we will ensure their success by minimizing obstacles and, eventually, building charging stations, cleaning and maintenance places, and so on. After all, the vacuum cleaner robot will need a place to empty its dirt, and the garbage robot will need to be able to carry the garbage outside the home. I wouldn't be surprised to see robot quarters in homes, that is, specially built niches where the robots can reside, out of the way, when they are not active. We have closets and pantries for today's appliances, so why not ones especially equipped for robots, with doors that can be controlled by the robot, electrical outlets, interior lights so robots can see to clean
themselves (and plug themselves into the outlets), and waste receptacles where appropriate.