Fascination with Life, its defining characteristics and attempts to imitate and reproduce these have been one of the more scientific pursuits of human civilization in recent times. Since the clashing of the mechanist and Cartesian views of Life in the eighteenth century, there has existed a contradictory expectation of Automata specifically Artificial Intelligence. On one hand, it is hoped that the processes that define life and intelligence in natural organisms and more enthusiastically in humans can be simulated through the Mechanical means as essentially there is a belief that these processes are in themselves mechanical and hence it is reasonable to assume they would lend themselves to simulation whereas on the other hand, the opposing viewpoint that this simulation of the intelligent processes such as speech, logic and various other instances of day to day activities that require intelligence will be impossible to do exactly in a manner that can be considered intelligent or genuine and hence cannot be considered a surgical exposition as to how these processes actually work.
It Feels!!
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence serve as examples to highlight these ongoing questions. I would like to discuss the example of Kismet – a sociable robot to highlight these issues.
Kismet is an expressive Robot which communicates through methods that are considered natural to human beings (i.e. via speech, modulation and expressions of face) and can also take cues, input through these methods. Kismet has been developed by the AI group of MIT and showcases the advances made in the field of robotic understanding of subtle human expressions or what is also known more recently as ‘Affective Computing’.(whose goal to say in brief is to make the machine interpret the emotional state of humans and adapt its behavior to them, giving an appropriate response for those emotions.
Watch this Video:
We can observe that the robot responds not only to what is being said(in this case scolding), but also to the tone of voice, their facial expression and other factors and gives weightage to each before coming to an appropriate response which is drooping it’s face and eyes i.e. the typical response we would expect from a human child on being chided. Thus , it can be readily seen that this Robot is simulating and responding retroactively to natural communication from a human. Can this be taken as a sign of intelligence? Is it right to say that Kismet is capable of ‘Intelligent’ Emotional Response? Well, consider this – Kismet makes use of all the components – facial expression, tone, and the words to make sense of how to respond, but what if one of these component inputs were missing? Or worse yet - counter indicative of a different emotion? How will the robot interpret then? What about Body Language and context of the conversation? ( We have all been in situations where we were deliberately thrown off by misleading emotions by the other person but were still able to figure out the actual underlying emotion from previous interactions and various other clues not related directly to the conversation).
Two sides to the Tale
One answer might be to argue saying that research in this area is nascent and realization of such subtle exceptions and rules within rules of emotional reading will unknot themselves in time – which seems reasonable another way to look at this is to say that emotion is not by itself a standalone quality of the mind but refined by the experiences and stimulus we face over time and hence efforts such as those in Kismet to simulate emotional response as a singleton is only portraying the topical emotional response (a mimic if you will call it) and does not show the true processing of the emotion as such which is its impact on the course of the communication and in shaping the style of response to future conversations, other interactions in the long run and broadly the personality, psychology of the being(in this case the robot) as such.
The complications of Simulation
We have seen that Kismet is capable of responding in an ‘emotional’ manner to human interaction but this raises other questions when it comes to simulation of life through artificial machinery – is it possible to do these things as efficiently as handled by organisms? To begin to answer this question, we must first understand the amount of circuitry required in constructing this emoting curiosity - It involves two dedicated computers, four cameras and four lip actuators to say the very least. This amount of circuitry and complexity to partially achieve such a simple task as reading faces and tone, which comes naturally to humans, seems to show that mimicking aspects of life and human intelligence through mechanical means is at best an expensive hobby few can choose to enjoy. However, in taking this approach what we will be forgetting is the fact that the workings of the human mind are not fully understood and that these sort of experiments can help to shed light on how the actual human mind works, test current hypothesis and may even help in turn to create better designs which come closer to approximating the human emotional reality and in general the mechanisms of intelligence.
Wrapping it up
In Conclusion, it can be seen that even those applications which seem to have come a long way since the Defecating Duck and other eighteenth century amusements, rather than demonstrate the closeness we are to achieving AI seem to show how far off we still are from stimulating Intelligence and other complex aspects of Life’s machinery. This may give the impression of a unified march by scientists on the road to failure, but what one needs to see is that every simulation is opening up new question hitherto unasked and by that virtue cause new aspects and defining details to come into view, at the same time leading to new connections being discovered between far flung problems and consequently helping to uncover a unifying theory of the organic intelligence.
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