Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

Robot as Partner
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In the last paradigm, a person collaborates with the robot in a social manner
as he or she would with a teammate (Grosz, 1996). Robots that interact with
people as capable partners need to possess social and emotional intelligence
so that they can respond appropriately. A robot that cares for an elderly person
should be able to respond appropriately when the patient shows signs of
distress or anxiety. It should be persuasive in ways that are sensitive, such as
reminding the patient when to take medication, without being annoying or
upsetting. It would need to know when to contact a health professional when
necessary. Yet, so many current technologies (animated agents, computers,
etc.) interact with us in a manner characteristic of socially or emotionally
impaired people. In the best cases, they know what to do but often lack the
social–emotional intelligence to do it in an appropriate manner. As a result,
they frustrate us and we quickly dismiss them even though they can be useful.
Given that many exciting applications for autonomous robots in the future
place them in a long-term relationship with people, robot designers need
to address these issues or people will not accept robots into their daily lives.
WHY SOCIAL/SOCIABLE ROBOTS?
In order to interact with others (whether it is a device, a robot, or even another
person), it is essential to have a good conceptual model for how the other
operates (Norman, 2001). With such a model, it is possible to explain and
predict what the other is about to do, its reasons for doing it, and how to elicit
a desired behavior from it. The design of a technological artifact, whether it is
a robot, a computer, or a teapot, can help a person form this model by “projecting
an image of its operation,” through either visual cues or continual feedback
(Norman, 2001). Hence, there is a very practical side to developing robots
that can effectively convey and communicate their internal state to people for
cooperative tasks, even when the style of interaction is not social.
For many autonomous robot applications, however, people will most
likely use a social model to interact with robots in anthropomorphic terms.
Humans are a profoundly social species. Our social–emotional intelligence
is a useful and powerful means for understanding the behavior of, and for
interacting with, some of the most complex entities in our world, people
and other living creatures (Dennett, 1987). Faced with nonliving things of
sufficient complexity (i.e., when the observable behavior is not easily understood
in terms of physics and its underlying mechanisms), we often apply
a social model to explain, understand, and predict their behavior, attributing