Chapter 4: Thinking
72 - Motivational Program (Part Two)
Emotion clearly does play a role in mentality. Nature retains few useless features, and the parts of our brains responsible for feelings are still very much alive and kicking. We also know now that they are part of the mental energy that fuels higher cognitive operations. But could there be too much of a good thing? Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson has said, “If chimpanzees had the atom bomb, we’d all be dead in a matter of weeks.” And what about teenagers?
“Yes, for sure,” says Picard, “especially if you just think we are giving these machines the ability to have temper tantrums. But that’s certainly not what this is about…None of us wants to wait for the computer to feel interested in what we have to say before it will listen to us.” It’s not a question of one or the other, Picard says, adding, “I think balance is the real issue here. I wouldn’t hire a secretary because she’s more emotional, right? But I also wouldn’t hire one that didn’t have emotions. That would be just as disastrous…What we’re looking for is the sweet spot between two extremes.”
While the ultimate nature of emotion remains a subject of controversy, work is proceeding. Writes Juan Velasquez [PDF], a graduate student who worked with Picard and laid some essential groundwork, “We model affect as a network of reactive emotional systems which represent a basic emotion family such as anger, fear, or disgust. Each of these systems has several sensors, organized into four different groups—neural, sensorimotor, motivational, and cognitive—that represent different kinds of both cognitive and non-cognitive elicitors for the emotion family represented by that particular system.”
A charming outgrowth of this work is Kismet, a robotic face and head assembled by Cynthia Breazeal, a grad student in Rodney Brooks’ lab, with Picard helping out as an adviser. The project serves as a test platform for behaviors intended for a more elaborate robot named Cog. In building Kismet, Breazeal sought to create a face that actually expresses feelings. Her attempt employs a collection of roughly human features—cartoonlike big blue eyes with eyelids, lips that open and close, pink ears and bushy eyebrows—all hung from an open framework and looking like a symbiotic merger between an Erector set and Mr. Potato Head. Although her features are rudimentary, Kismet still manages to display a certain goofy allure as she works the crowd, trying to elicit emotional responses from those around her.
“Kismet takes advantage of the way we are programmed to interact with small children,” Breazeal says. If “shameless” is a word that can be applied to a robot, Kismet is all of that. Left alone, she pouts, but when someone comes along to play, her face lights up—the eyebrows rise as her eyes open wide and ears perk. But should her human companion just repeat the same game over and over, she gets bored and her face droops.
Kismet has a repertoire of nine expressions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, calm, interest, tiredness, disgust, and surprise. Those are in turn motivated by a set of interacting drives—whose intensities increase or decline based on Kismet’s level of satiation. When she’s left alone, her social drive increases. When she detects a face nearby, she focuses on it and starts socializing. As she plays, the expression on her face becomes happier while her social drive decreases. But if the interaction becomes too demanding, she scowls with displeasure. “These drives are always changing in time,” says Breazeal. “When one need becomes very strong, behaviors such as facial expressions that act to satiate that need become active.”
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