Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

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mental states (i.e., intents, beliefs, feelings, desires, etc.) to understand it
(Reeves & Naas, 1996; Premack & Premack, 1995). Right or wrong, people
rely on social models (or fluidly switch between using a social model and
other mental models) to make complex behavior more familiar, understandable,
and intuitive. We do this because it is enjoyable for us and often surprisingly
quite useful (Dennett, 1987).
From a design perspective, the emotive system would implement much
of the style and personality of a robot, encoding and conveying its attitudes
and behavioral inclinations toward the events it encounters. Designing robots
with personality may help provide people with a good mental model for them.
According to Norman (2001), personality is a powerful design tool for helping
people form a conceptual model that channels beliefs, behaviors, and intensions
in a cohesive and consistent set of behaviors. The parameters of the
personality must fall within recognizable human (or animal) norms, however;
otherwise, the robot may appear mentally ill or completely alien. The robot’s
personality must be designed such that its behavior is understandable and
predictable to people. Natural behavior can be a useful guide in this respect.
This raises an important question: to what extent does the robot’s design
support the social model? Simply stated, does applying a social mental
model to understand and interact with the robot actually work? Many early
examples of “social robots” (i.e., robot toys or entertainment robots) only
projected the surface appearance of social and emotional intelligence. This
may be acceptable for a sufficiently structured scenario (e.g., as theme park
entertainment, etc.) where the environment and the audience’s interaction
with the robot are highly constrained. However, as the complexity of the
environment and the interaction scenario increases, the social sophistication
of the robot will clearly have to scale accordingly. Once the robot’s behavior
fails to support the social model a person has for it, the usefulness of the
model breaks down. Ideally, the robot’s observable behavior will continue
to adhere to a person’s social expectations of it during natural interactions
in the full complexity of the human environment. We argue that it will not
be possible to achieve this degree of scalability without tackling the (hard)
problem of developing “deep” architectures for socially and emotionally intelligent
robots (see Chapter 8, Sloman et al.).
DESIGNING SOCIABLE ROBOTS
The Sociable Robots Project develops expressive anthropomorphic robots
to explore scientific questions and to address engineering challenges of building
socially and emotionally intelligent robots. Their social and emotive
qualities are integrated deep into the core of their design and serve not only