Emotion Generating Technology.
My girlfriend took me to a huge toystore called FAO Schwarz (on the corner of Central Park east and Fifth Avenue) in New York. I was looking at this little robot dog called Aibo made by Sony that displays learning behaviour and plays around with kids. It recognises faces and develops its own personality over time.
A few weeks earlier I saw the movie AI again on DVD. It has a little robotic teddybear in it with real personality (Teddy), and I was thinking: if they ever really make that it will be a huge hit. Teddy has real personality, and is very loveable. It also has a little boy robot in it, which also extremely lovable but also a bit creepy sometimes.
Interestingly, in the movie, older robot models are easily discarded for newer models, a behaviour I observed in real life in the toy store as well. (see picture below)
Notice the poor little robot in the corner nobody wants anymore. It is a primitve early model, not nearly as interesting as aibo: everybody is standing around a demonstration of him.
But when I was watching a kid playing with the Sony robot dog, it didn't really treat it with a lot of emotion: it prodded it and tried to find out how it worked. It was curiosity, not emotion. Maybe emotion takes time? Then again, maybe not. When kids hug a toy, there is emotion. So it's not technological advancement that generates emotions.
Movie of kid playing with robot dog (.avi, 888K) (See also this movie of a kid playing with an older type of robot, .avi, 834K)
How can technology generate emotions?
What would make you so attached to a technology you wouldn't want to hurt its feelings? Or is that even what we want? Maybe we just want technology that can generate emotions in us but doesn't have needs of its own? Like a drug, really.
Also:
Why do people care for plants?
Our relationship with technology could be like the one we have with dogs and cats. Or like the one we have with our favourite toys. Or like the one we have with plants we care for.
A few years ago, there was a short rage of a little toy called tamagotchi (research on Tamagotchi). It was really small, hung on a keychain, and you had to regularly "feed" it and "pet" it by pressing certain buttons or it would "die". It generated the emotion anxiety: once people felt they had it in a stable state (so it wouldn't die), they tended to get bored with it. (This conclusion is based on admittedly little evidence.)
I was discussing this last Sunday with my friend Jay and he came up with a good rule for active Emotion Generating Technology: the why-did-you-do-that function. A toy like that would have to have its own boundaries, its own internal rules and behavior in order not to be boring, but it would also be important for its owner to be able to predict and understand it. The Why-did-you-do-that function allows the owner to ask that and to tell it to do something different next time.
Remember Terminator II? When the terminator first meets the boy, the boy has to teach him not to kill people. That's a why-did-you-do-that function.
EGT (Emotion Generating Technology) is not nessecarily about language recognition: dogs don't speak or understand us, and yet people really truly love them.
EGT isn't about advanced technology either. You could have relatively simple technology capable of generating emotional responses. At least, I like to think you could. Research is needed to find out what it is about technology that could generate lasting emotional responses.
There's another interesting thing going on I learned from animated movies: too much realism becomes creepy. You can get to 95% realism and be fine. But when you go over that, at say 99% realism, it gets creepy instead of cute. You are unconsciously picking up signals something is wrong, but consciously you can't tell what. So being too realistic isn't good. In Shrek, the modelers decided to make the princess Fiona character less realistic and more cartoon-like after initial tests showed the realism was too creepy.
Anyways, if you have personal stories about your experience of emotions with technology, please let me know. Links to research and other related stuff are very welcome as well.