Your new best friend may be a robot
Baku, February 14 (AZERTAC). Cynthia Breazeal is an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. She is the author of "Designing Sociable Robots." She says:
“The provocative idea worth spreading in the talk I gave at the TEDWomen conference is that robots are a really intriguing social technology. This idea has emerged from pursuing my childhood dream of creating personal robots that are a meaningful, empowering and enriching part of our everyday lives.
Today, when we think of personal technologies, we think of things such as smartphones and laptop computers. When we think of social technologies, we think of things such as Twitter and Facebook.
Today, social technology helps people be social (e.g.,interact, communicate, collaborate, share, recommend, etc.). In the future, social technology may BE social, too -- in the form of social robots. My talk touches on a few different dimensions of what "social" means in this context:
Robots "push our social buttons." As humans, we are deeply and profoundly social. It is a great strength of ours. We think about and understand the social world in different ways than the physical world.
It turns out that robots can be designed to exhibit behaviors that engage our social brain. We are subconsciously compelled to try to understand and relate to social robots as beings, not things -- even while fully knowing that they are a (special) kind of machine.
For instance, if robots share our nonverbal cues (gestures, facial expressions, body posture, etc.) and use them appropriately, then we respond to these cues, use them to form social judgments and adjust our behavior based on these judgments -- as we would predict when interacting with people.
Understanding this insight opens new possibilities for robots as a personal and ubiquitous technology where the robot`s social attributes are a key part of its functionality and help us achieve personal goals. Possible indispensable applications -- or "killer apps" -- for social robots could be in the domains of health, eldercare, education, telecommunication and entertainment.
This is the flip side of the first point. We may respond to social robots in social-psychological terms, but social robots then need to hold up their end of the interaction.
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