Robot Love! How to start a relationship with a Robot?

Robots, artificial intelligence, and humans are developing at an accelerating pace. More and more the lives of robots and humans are mixing and real encounters are happening more frequent in real life. Robot love is discovering the connection between humans and robots. This field needs a lot of learning, experiences, boundaries, and education. This requires knowledge, attention and foremost love. Robot love is a fascinating event hosted in the Netherlands providing and offering the possibility to discover and experience this love in person. The event is hosted between 15th of September till December 2018 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. 

This event is a fascinating and optimistic combination of design, engineering, science, and art. It discovers the chances and inspiration of the possibility of a closer relationship between robots and humans. Not only does it discover a bright romantic view of the future of human-robot interaction, it also discovers conflicts, dangers and social consequences of robotics. But most of all LOVE for this fascinating industry. Robot love is organizing an exposition of multiple experiments and real scenarios giving you the opportunity to experience real love for robots and the robots will love you back for it. 

How to create your relationship with robots.

Most of us are slightly hesitant to build a relationship with robots. Popular futurists present us a dystopian society where robots will overrule humans. Together with the stories from movies like The Terminator, we get a very scary image of our future relationship with robots. But let’s face it, factory workers are already experiencing the collaboration and it is inevitable to see more robots in our place of work. These are our future new co-workers, so let’s deal with it and get our robot love started. 

Robot love offers us a new perspective on the growing collaboration between humans and robots. A group of artists shows us a different perspective to explore our relationship with robots. 

Empathize with them            

The first step in human-robot collaboration is for us to grow the ability to emphasize with the robots. We often see them as shiny metallic creatures made of hard plastic and metal. This makes it difficult to emphasize with them since we immediately see our differences. One of the experiments to bridge this gap is “Dirk” the homes robot. (Video below). Fred Abels, a Dutch Artist and the creator of Dirk, made Dirk as an artwork and social experiment. He learned to depict and program the opposite of our known behavior in a robot. Learning a lot about the nuances of human movement. The homeless robot was so realistic that it is so often perceived as human when walking around the shopping mall. It even got arrested once. 

This project inspires our curiousness for empathy for robots. Feelings we have for homeless people projected on a machine. Trapping ourselves uncomfortable to realize it is a machine. And realize we are able to feel something for robots. 

Learn to evolve with them

We see the history and the fast evolution of robots. Just have a look at chatbot. The first chatbots have been created in 1977 as rather clunky and preprogrammed interfaces. Tailored to discuss just one specific topic. Now they have evolved to fully conversational interfaces. The recent demonstration of Google assistant demonstrated that humans perceive a phone call with robots as pleasant and have no idea they are talking to a robot. And this is no surprise. Large call centers already use robots for a couple of years to handle the basic to medium questions for customers. The advantage is clear. Personal interaction reduced waiting times and low time to train the new robot-agent and they have access to the most recent company information. We need to evolve with robots and these systems make us feel more comfortable talking to a robot on a human level. 

Be creative with them

The common idea about the introduction of robots in the workplace is that robots will handle the repetitive, boring, very accurate and sometimes hazardous tasks. Knowing this means humans can spend more time on creative and challenging tasks producing new and more ideas and insights. This looks like a kind of hierarchical relationship. However, this is not entirely true. Robots can work next to us and as a team engages in a creative journey. Using the power of artificial intelligence we can combine new ideas using complex algorithms to create new artwork or designs. This is also beneficial for humans since we are often short of time working out all possible design options to solve a specific solution. One additional example is the recipe implementation of IBM Watson. This AI is made possible by digesting thousands of recipes, to create new and very creative dishes with a wonderful taste.

The video below shows what happens if we ask a video algorithm to create an artwork out of a visit to the supermarket. It looks like a creative interpretation of the visit. 

The Ted talk by Maurice Conti shows how we can use intuitive artificial intelligence to jointly design new constructions never seen before. 

We need to rethink our working relationships with robots. Not see them as the next step of the automated workforce and rather see them as another creative team worker helping us to associate and explore new ideas to real solutions. Are you able to imagine a working relationship with a robot? 

Diminishing boundaries between humans and robots

The growing presence of robots in the workplace and appreciation for our new robot workforce will mean a lot for the boundaries between humans and robots. Today we see robots as machines who are able to follow our commands. A more conversational capable robot makes us develop a more intense relationship with the robots and actually care about them. Look at how your kids converse with Siri and you learn that they feel Siri is another one of their friends instead of a machine. The ability to handle and respond to human rigorous and sometimes sarcastic conversation is making robots more human. Having personal virtual artificial assistants makes it sometimes difficult to see the difference between humans and bots. Look at some of the new care bots who are helping the elderly both functionally and socially, starting a nice discussion with their human peers. The people conversing with the robot experience a pleasant conversation even though they know it is a robot they are talking to. 

Visit the exhibition Robot Love

I think we have to embrace the possibilities robots offer us. We are too focused on the economic aspects of robots such as improved efficiency and loss of jobs. There are so many opportunities where we can develop an intellectual and meaningful life together with robots. We have to imagine our future together with robots and think about the ethical, relational and technological relationship we are going to form with robots. Robots are here, we better start to learn to love them. 

A visit of Robot Love will inspire you for sure and spur new ideas and innovative approaches to the new world of digitization. I love to hear how you got inspired, share your ideas and comments below or contact me at [email protected] if you want to learn more about this development. 

Robbrecht van Amerongen is Business Manager at Conclusion. If you like this post please share via one of the buttons below or press the thumbs-up icon. #robots #machinelearning #artificialinteligence