“Emotional robots . . . I’ve got a hunch this isn’t going to happen in my lifetime.” I’m a bit crestfallen.
“Well, it will probably take a century, but that’s a blip in human history, right?” he says in a reassuring tone. “What’s a century? It’s nothing. If you look at the curve of humans on Earth,” he says, curving one hand a few inches off the table, “we’re right there. That’s a hundred years.”
“So much has happened in just the last two hundred years,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s been quite an express ride.”
“Exactly. And the field is accelerating. But there’s good and bad, right? If you say ‘emotions,’ then you have depression, you have deception, you have creativity and curiosity—creativity and curiosity we’re already seeing here in various machines.
“My lab is called the Creative Machines Lab because I want to make machines which
are
creative, and that’s a very very controversial topic in engineering, because most engineers—
close the door, speak quietly
—are stuck in the Intelligent Design way of thinking, where the engineer is the intelligent person and the machines are
being created
, they just do the menial stuff. There’s a very clear division.
The idea that a
machine
can create things—possibly more creatively than the engineer that designed the machine—well, it’s very troubling to some people, it questions a lot of fundamentals.”
Will they grow attached to others, play games, feel empathy, crave mental rest, evolve an aesthetics, value fairness, seek diversion, have fickle palates and restless minds? We humans are so far beyond the Greek myth of Icarus, and its warning about overambition (father-and-son inventors and wax wings suddenly melting in the sun). We’re now strangers in a strange world of our own devising, where becoming a creator, even the Creator, of other species is the ultimate intellectual challenge. Will our future robots also design new species, bionts whose form and mental outlook we can’t yet imagine?
“What’s this?” I ask, momentarily distracted by a wad of plastic nestled on a shelf.
He hands me the strange entanglement of limbs and joints, a small robot with eight stiff black legs that end in white ball feet. The body is filamental, like a child’s game of cat’s cradle gone terribly wrong, and it has no head or tentacles, no bulging eyes, no seedlike brain. It wasn’t designed as an insect. Or designed by humans, for that matter.
Way back in our own evolution, we came from fish that left the ocean and flopped from one puddle to another. In time they evolved legs, a much better way to get around on land. When Lipson’s team asked a computer to invent something that could get from point A to point B—without programming it how to walk—at first it created robots reminiscent of that fish, with multihinged legs, flopping forward awkwardly. A video, posted on YouTube, records its first steps, with Lipson looking on like a proud parent, one who appreciates how remarkable such untutored trials really are. Bits of plastic were urged to find a way to combine, think as one, and move themselves, and they did.
In another video, a critter trembles and skitters, rocks and slides. But gradually it learns to coordinate its legs and steady its torso, inching
forward like a worm, and then walking insectlike—except that it wasn’t told to model an insect. It dreamt up that design by itself, as a more fluent way forward. Awkward, but effective. Baby steps were fine. Lipson didn’t expect grace. He could make a spider robot that would run faster, look better, and be more reliable, but that’s not the point. Other robots are bending, flexing, and running, using replica tendons and muscles. DARPA’s “cheetah” was recently clocked at a tireless 30 mph sprint. But that cheetah was programmed; it would be a four-legged junkpile without a human telling it what to do. Lipson wants the robot to do everything on its own, eclipsing what any human can design, unfettered by the paltry ideas of its programmers.
It’s a touching goal. Surpassing human limits is so human a quest, maybe the most ancient one of all, from an age when dreams were omens dipped in moonlight, and godlike voices raged inside one’s head. A time of potent magic in the landscape. Mountains attracted rain clouds and hid sacred herbs, malevolent spirits spat earthquakes or drought, tyrants ruled certain trees or brooks, offended waterholes could ankle off in the night, and most animals parleyed with at least one god or demon. What was human agency compared to that?
L
ooking around Lipson’s quiet lab, I sense something missing. “You have real students sitting at the computer benches. I don’t see any chatbots.”
Lipson smiles indulgently. His chatbots have been a YouTube craze. “That was just an afternoon hack. It went viral in twenty-four hours and took us completely by surprise.”
He doesn’t mean “hack” in its usual sense of breaking into a computer with malicious intent, but as highwire digital artistry. The
Urban Dictionary
defines its slang use like this: “v. To program a computer in a clever, virtuosic, and wizardly manner. Ordinary computer jockeys merely write programs; hacking is the domain of digital poets. Hacking is a subtle and arguably mystical art, equal parts wit and technical ability, that is rarely appreciated by non-hackers.”
One day, Lipson asked two of his PhD students to bring a demo chatbot to his Artificial Intelligence class. Acting a bit like a portable, rudimentary psychotherapist, a chatbot is an online program that reflects what someone says in slightly different words and asks open-ended questions. It can come across as surprisingly lifelike
(which says a lot about the clichés that pass for everyday chitchat). But in 1997 a “Cleverbot,” designed by the British AI expert Rollo Carpenter, went online with a teeming arcade of phrases compiled from all of its past conversations. Each encounter had taught it more about how to interact with humans, including the subtleties of innuendo and pricks of friendly debate, and it learned to apply those nuances in the next chat. Since then it’s held twenty million conversations, and its verbal larder is a treasury (or a snakepit) of useful topics, ripe phrases, witty responses, probing questions, defensive expressions, and the subtle rules of engagement, gleaned from years of bantering with humans.
Lipson’s grad students set the laptops face-to-face on a table so that they could tête-à-tête in a virtual parlor. On one screen a computer-generated male materialized, on the other screen a female. The man spoke with a slight British accent, the woman in a syncopated Indian voice. Fortunately, the grad students videotaped the encounter and posted it online, where the chatty Cleverbots have now enchanted over four million people with their oddly human conversation.
The robots begin with a simple “Hello there,” followed by pleasantries, but as they respond to one another they soon start to disagree, and the exchange grows funny, poignant, snarky, and thoroughly hypnotic.
“You were mistaken,” Mr. Cleverbot says to Ms. Cleverbot, adding sarcastically, “which is odd, since memory shouldn’t be a problem for you!”
“What is God to you?” she asks him at one point.
“Not everything,” he says. It’s a surprisingly plausible answer.
“Not everything could still be something,” she insists with jesuitical aplomb.
“Very true,” he concedes.
“I would like to believe it is.”
“Do
you
believe in God?” he asks.
“Yes I do,” she says emphatically.
“So you’re Christian . . .”
“No I am
not
!” she snaps.
They bicker and make nice-nice. He calls her a “meanie,” for not being helpful. She suddenly asks him a painful question, one any human might wonder about. Still, it’s disquieting to hear.
“Don’t you want to have a body?”
And then, surprisingly, like someone who has accepted a fate he nonetheless laments, he answers: “Sure.”
What else is there to say? Abruptly they freeze into replica humans once more, and the video clip is over. Some people detect animosity or sexual tension between the man and woman, others a marital spat. We’re ready to accept fictional robots in movies and stories, but are we ready for a synthetic life form that feels regret, introspects, and conducts relationships—creatures opaque to us, whose minds we can’t fully mirror? Do the chatbots appeal because they’re so like us, or because we’re so like them?
There are scores of people in robotics who can fine-tune a robot’s movements, even design truly lifelike robots with delicately mobile faces. Italian roboticists, for example, have created a series of realistic-looking heads that synchronize thirty-two motors hidden beneath the robots’ polymer skin, and mimic all of our facial expressions, based on muscle movements, and can even capture the emotional space between furrowing the brows, say, and frowning. Such robots have already passed the stage of being a mere sensation in the robotics world. Fully-featured human faces are smiling, grimacing, exchanging knowing looks the world over. Unlike Madame Tussaud’s wax-museum stars, today’s robots look lifelike enough to seem a bit creepy, with facial expressions that actually elicit empathy and make your mirror neurons quiver. Equally realistic squishy bodies aren’t far behind. One can easily imagine the day, famously foretold in the movies
Blade Runner
and
Alien
, when computers with faces feel silicon flavors of paranoia, love, melancholy, anger, and the other stirrings of our carbon hearts. Then the already lively debate about whether machines are conscious will really heat up. This was always the next step toward
designing a self-aware, agile, reasoning, feeling, moody
other,
who may look like you or your sibling (but have better manners).
No doubt “robot sociology” and “robot psychology” will emerge as important disciplines, because there’s an interesting thing that happens when robots become self-aware. Just like people, they sometimes get wrong impressions of themselves, skewed enough to create robot delinquents, and we might start to see traits parallel to psychological problems in humans.
When I used to volunteer as a telephone Crisis Line counselor, it wasn’t always easy finding ways to help the callers who phoned in deep despair or creased by severe personality disorders. Self-aware robots with social crises, neuroses, even psychoses? That might prove a challenge. Would they identify with and prefer speaking to others of their kind? Suppose it concerned a relationship with humans? Colleges have popular schools of “International Labor Relations,” “Human Ecology,” and “Social Work.” Can “Interspecies Labor Relations,” “Robot Ecology,” and “Silicon Social Work” be far behind? How about a relief order for aged, infirm, or incarcerated robots, such as “Android Daughters of Charity” or “Our Sisters of Perpetual Motion?”
What would the
Umwelt
(worldview encompassing thoughts, feelings, and sensations) of a self-aware robot be like? We’re no longer entertaining such ideas merely as flights of imagination, but contemplating how to behave in a rapidly approaching future with the startling technology we’re generating. If, as Lipson says, our new species of conscious, intelligent robots will learn through curiosity and experience, much as children do, then even robo-tots will need good parenting. Who will set those codes of behavior—individuals or society as a whole?
CAN WE LIVE
inside a house that’s a robotic butler, protector, and chatbot companion all rolled into one, an entity with its own personality and metabolism? Its brain would be a robotic Jeeves (or maybe Leaves), who tends the meadow walls and human family with equal pride, and is a good listener, with a bevy of facial expressions. A fully
butlered house with a face that rises from a plastic wall would monitor the energy grid, fuel the car (with hydrogen), while exchanging news, ordering groceries, piloting a personal drone to the post office, and preparing a Moosewood Restaurant lunch recipe that includes herbs from the herb-garden island in the kitchen, and arugula and tomatoes from the rooftop garden. In some high-tech enclaves, smart locks are now opened by virtual keys on iPhones, and family members wear a computer tracking chip that stores their preferences. As they move through each room, lights turn on ahead of them and fade away behind, a thermostat adjusts itself, the song or TV show or movie they were enjoying greets them, favorite food and drink are proffered. The house’s nervous system is what’s known as the “Internet of Things.”
In 1999, the technology pioneer Kevin Ashton coined the term for a cognitive web that unites a mob of physical and virtual digital devices—furnace, lights, water, computers, garage door, oven, etc.—with the physical world, much as cells in the body communicate to coordinate actions. As they cabal among themselves, synchronizing their energy use and activities, they can also share data with the neighborhood, city, and wired world.
Combining animal, vegetable, mineral, and machine, his idea is playing out in the avant-garde new city of Songdo, South Korea, where the Internet of Things is nearly ubiquitous. Smart homes, shops, and office buildings stream data continuously to a cadre of computers that sense, scrutinize, and make decisions, monitoring and piloting the whole synchronous city, mainly without human help. They’re able to analyze picayune details and make sure all the infrastructure hums smoothly, changing traffic flow during rush hour as needed, watering parks and market gardens, or promptly removing garbage (which is sucked down through subterranean warrens to a processing center where it’s sorted, deodorized, and recycled). Toiling invisibly in the background, the council of computers can organize massive subway repairs, or send you a personal cell phone alert if your bus is running late.
It’s a little odd thinking of computers taking meetings on the fly and gabbing together in an alien argot. But naming it the Internet of
Things
domesticates an idea that might otherwise frighten us. We know and enjoy the Internet, already older than many of its users, and familiar now as a pet. In an age where even orangutans Skype on iPads, what could be more humdrum than the all-purpose, nondescript word “things”? The Internet of Things reassures us that this isn’t a revolutionary idea—though, in truth, it is—just an everyday technology linked to something vague and harmless sounding. It doesn’t suggest brachiating from one reality to another; it just expands the idea of last century’s cozy new technology, and animates the idea of home.