YSM Issue 94.1

FEATURE
Robotics
BY VERONICA LEE | ART BY CECILIA LEE
ROBOTIC
THEORY
OF MIND
THE FUTURE OF ROBOTS
IS MORE HUMAN THAN
WE EXPECT
With self-driving cars, powerful
AI-like facial recognition
powering our smartphones,
and machine learning inside of
transportation apps like Uber, it seems
like we already live in a world run by
robots. However, many still believe that
there remains a clear division between
“human” and “non-human.” Sure, robots
may be able to drive along a street or
play a specific song when asked, but
humans claim the realm of emotion and
empathy for ourselves. But recent robotic
innovations suggest that such traits may
not be so unique to humans after all.
PhD student Boyuan Chen and
Professor of Mechanical Engineering and
Data Science Hod Lipson at Columbia
University are among the researchers
seeking to demonstrate just that—starting
by giving robots the ability to predict
behavior based on visual processing alone.
“We’re trying to get robots to
understand other robots, machines, and
intelligent agents around them,” Lipson
said. “If you want robots to integrate into
society in any meaningful way, they need
to have social intelligence: the ability to
read other agents and understand what
they are planning to do.”
Theory of mind, the ability to recognize
that others have different mental states,
goals, and plans than your own, is an
integral part of early development in
humans, appearing at around the age
of three. Allowing us to understand the
mental state of those around us, theory
of mind acts as the basic foundation for
more complex social interactions such as
cooperation, empathy, and deception.
In children, it can be observed in
successful participation in “false-belief”
tasks, such as the famous Sally-Anne test,
in which the participant is asked questions
to see if they understand that two fictional
characters, Sally and Anne, have different
information thus different beliefs. If a child is
able to recognize that different information
is known to different people, this is a strong
indicator that they possess theory of mind.
As children develop further, they naturally
develop the social skills needed to navigate
the world around them.
“We humans do this all the time in
lots of subtle ways,” Lipson said. “As we
communicate with each other, we read
facial expressions to see what the other
person is thinking.”
It is this very ability that Chen and Lipson
hope to one day give to robots. To do so,
however, they must first start with the basics
of theory of mind. After all, what comes
so easily to us as humans is not so easily
produced in robots. In their recent research,
they sought to find evidence that theory
of mind is preceded by something called
“visual behavior modeling.” In essence, they
wanted to see if robots could understand and
predict the behaviors of another agent purely
from visual analysis of the situation.
24 Yale Scientific Magazine March 2021
www.yalescientific.org