Kismet, an "expressive robotic creature" created at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Click on the picture to watch human-like robots in action. Photo credit: Jared C. Benedict
In April, the government of Japan released more than 60 pages of recommendations to "secure the safe performance of next-generation robots," which called for a centralized database to log all robot-inflicted human injuries. That same month, the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) updated its "Roboethics Roadmap," a document broadly listing the ethical implications of projected developments like robotic surgeons, soldiers, and sex workers. And in March, South Korea provided a sneak peek at its "Robot Ethics Charter" slated for release later in 2007. The charter envisioned a near future wherein humans may run the risk of becoming emotionally dependent on or addicted to their robots.
The close timing of these three developments reflects a sudden upswing in international awareness that the pace of progress in robotics is rapidly propelling these fields into uncharted ethical realms. Gianmarco Veruggio, the Genoa University roboticist who organized the first international roboethics conference in 2004, says, "We are close to a robotics invasion." Across the technologically developed world, we're building progressively more human-like machines, in part as a result of a need for functional, realistic prosthetics, but also because we just seem to be attracted to the idea of making them. Honda's ASIMO and Sony's QRIO are the remarkable proof-of-concept products that illustrate a strange yet pervasive urge in us to build ourselves all over again.
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It is the social interaction of these and similar machines that raises the most interesting questions, however. "Social robots" are now entering human culture, most frequently as entertainers for the very young and as caretakers for the very old. In Japan, consumers buy "therapeutic" robots like the humanoid Wakamaru, which is designed to provide companionship for the elderly and disabled and is capable of rudimentary social interactions with its owners. In the US, recent holiday seasons have seen parents clamoring for Furbys, Tickle Me Elmos, and other robotic toys for their kids to "nurture" and play with. It is this drive to build robots that appear to understand us and engage with us—and perhaps one day think like us—that is providing scientists with some unsettling and unique insights. And it's driving the emerging field of roboethics, which asks questions about how these machines affect us and how best to integrate them into our culture.
Of course, we've been grappling with the idea of physical and emotional dependence on our artificial creations since at least the time of the Romans. In the poet Ovid's story of the lonely sculptor Pygmalion, the artist becomes infatuated with his lifelike creation, the feminine statue Galatea. In Ovid's original tale, the gods bring Galatea to life and the couple conceives a son, but later versions take darker twists: George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play, Pygmalion, portrays an emotionally distant Eliza Doolittle (Galatea) ultimately rejecting her creator's affections.
A scientific understanding of human response to social robots began with MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's landmark experiments in 1966. Weizenbaum had developed a computer program that crudely mimicked a psychotherapist by rephrasing statements from human "patients" back to them as questions, thus supportively reflecting their thoughts. A user input of "I feel frustrated," for instance, returned, "Why do you feel frustrated?" Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA after the Galatea character in Shaw's play, whose mimicry of aristocratic speech propels her into high society.
Weizenbaum was deeply troubled by what he discovered during his experiments with ELIZA: Some of his students exhibited strong emotional connections to the program; some actually wished to be alone with it. Weizenbaum had unexpectedly discovered that, even if fully aware that they are talking to a simple computer program, people will nonetheless treat it as if it were a real, thinking being that cared about their problems—a phenomenon now known as the "Eliza Effect."