Do robots need to be taught to think? Do I need to teach them to speak? The answers to these questions seem obvious. But the question is "should a robot be able to flirt with a human?" at first sight it seems unexpected (unless you are one of those who live with mannequins). Nevertheless, this is one of the pressing topics for robotics. Artificial intelligence developers argue that the better machines learn to flirt, the better for humans and for progress in general. The New Republic publishes a long article on roboflirting by Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love. The Invention of Dating.
People have been trying to make cars show emotion for centuries in a row. Back in the 1770s, Swiss watchmakers Pierre and Henri-Louis Jacquet-Drozat, father and son, introduced their automatons - writing and drawing boys, as well as a girl who played the harmonium, who moved and breathed to show how music touches her (the cars are still in working order and are in the Museum of Art and History of the city of Neuchâtel, Switzerland). The rival of the watchmakers was the German inventor, merchant and furniture maker David Röntgen, who created a doll that played on cymbals, similar to Marie Antoinette; the master gave it to the empress as a gift. Just as in the 18th century society was passionate about making automata sensible, today we see it in popular culture,take at least the films "Artificial Intelligence" or "She" - it expects love and romance from machines.
Love the car
The computer beat a person in Go and is on the verge of becoming indistinguishable from a person during the Turing test (whether the Russian program "Evgeny Gustman" passed it in 2014 is still debated), and investors are pouring in hundreds of millions dollars in the development of "emotional" computer systems - capable of recognizing, interpreting and simulating human feelings, because they are what makes a person human. But to prove that you can simulate feelings, you need to evoke feelings in another. And to evoke feelings, you need to flirt. The ability to flirt is one of the most difficult, but necessary tasks that artificial intelligence developers will have to solve, because only when the machine begins to evoke reciprocal feelings in us, it will receive full return from us - it is needed in order toso that AI will take over from humans what it could not assimilate before, and this knowledge, in turn, will make computers even more perfect.
Flirting is an extremely complex job. The famous Austrian-German scientist Ireneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, who studied ethology in humans, observed for ten years how couples flirt in different parts of the world, and generalized the signs of flirting. For example, both men and women in the process of communication turn the hand over with the palm up, move their shoulders and tilt their heads so that the partner can see the neck. Psychologists agree that in this way we show someone who we like: I am not dangerous.
David Hanson, the founder of the American company Hanson Robotics and the creator of the humanoid with the head of Einstein, believes that this is the task of robotics: to make a machine that will not seem dangerous, but will be able to "truly live and love." Hanson's robots have human faces capable of simulating human facial expressions - furrowed eyebrows, a wide smile, a squint of eyes - thanks to the Frubber material (from English flesh and rubber - "flesh" and "rubber"), which looks like leather. According to the engineer, the ability to express emotions will make machines attractive to humans and truly involve humans in the process of communicating with a robot, and this will certainly bring a breakthrough in AI development closer. Two months ago, Hanson Robotics unveiled Sophia, a robot that hit the South By Southwest multimedia festival in Texas; it's hard to talk about Sofia, it's better to see her.
Promotional video:
But watching her, you understand what Hanson is talking about. For us to stop being afraid of robots, we must like them, and to like them, they must stop looking like robots. They should constantly slightly change body position and facial expressions, even if they are not going anywhere (watch yourself, you never freeze completely still), move their eyes even when talking face-to-face, not just answer a question, but also ask about what the interlocutor to maintain the conversation and so on, there are many nuances. Sofia's developers are sure that someday a person will fall in love with a robot. Why? Their answer is disarming: “Why does man study chimpanzees and dolphins so closely? We are alone as a species."
Hints and halftones
A car doesn't need to have a body or even a head to flirt - it can only be a voice like Siri or a chatbot. But here computers are faced with a difficult obstacle: it is easier to conduct a dialogue, reacting to the expression on a person's face, than to communicate with him in absentia. Body language is important, in all species of animals it gives the go-ahead for reproduction, but people also have another feature that determines the possibility of existence in society - social intelligence, that is, the ability to understand the behavior of others and recognize their feelings, including by non-verbal signals … Here, chat bots have a really hard time, because you need to be able to respond to a person and convince him that he is understood, without a dozen sensors that read the smallest changes in facial expressions.
Most chatbots are trained to respond to specific triggers and are helpless when it comes to reading cues, connotations, context, and feelings of the other person. However, there are already machines that are learning to understand all this - on such, in particular, are working at Google and other companies that develop artificial neural networks and other deep machine learning techniques that mimic the work of the human brain. According to programmers, analyzing millions and millions of pages of text, robots will eventually learn to understand the context and even define metaphors - that is, to do what they were previously unable to do. At the same time, without metaphors and wordplay, it is impossible to imagine human communication and even more so flirting. Even now, according to Weigel, the chatbot of the Californian company Brillig Understanding is more like a woman in correspondence,playing hard to get than a machine that can't pick up human hints.
In the not too distant future, developers will combine these communication skills with a robotic face that looks almost alive, as well as with gestures and tone of voice. Computers will learn to distinguish sarcasm by analyzing the shades of voice and facial expressions of the interlocutor, and then respond to the person depending on his mood. In other words, if you are sad, the machine will cheer you up, if you are playful, it will joke in response, if you are determined to philosophize, it will become serious. This will make us - scary to think - to trust robots, because we trust those whom we consider to be similar to ourselves.
Dangers of roboflirting
Flirting performed by machines will be useful in a huge number of areas. There are professions for which easy flirting that does not even imply a sexual continuation is an integral part - a PR manager, a flight attendant on an airplane, a nurse in a hospice: here we are no longer talking about service with a smile, but about a smile as a service.
However, another question immediately arises: who will the flirting robots really serve? By improving artificial intelligence, developers will persuade humanity to use machines where it was previously unimaginable. But the best chatbots and humanoids that mimic human behavior, including flirting, will almost certainly compel us to donate time and other resources to enrich their creators or owners. For example, the founder of the utopian religious group Terasem, whose members believe that soon a person will be able to create a conscious copy of himself in cyberspace and live forever, uses an android - a copy of his wife, as a PR tool and to illustrate the ideas of the movement. According to Weigel, an android, even without a body, already makes the interlocutor believethat he has feelings and desires, and evokes emotions in response. And emotions tend to deprive us of a sober look.
Ira Solomonova
