Reading Response 7—Emotional Machines

Intrigued by the title of the chapter--“Emotional machines”, I cannot help starting with the journey of imagination that what on earth was those machines with emotions that are only described for human-beings. Guided by some fancy ideas, I was led by these main questions explicitly demonstrated by Norman.

• Why do robots have to have emotions?
• What emotions will a robot need to have?
• How can robots show their emotions and then interactive with us?

According to Norman, machines, specifically Robots, should indeed both have and display emotions so that we human-beings can better interact with them. In addition, they can continuously deal with more complex and sophisticate situations and works when there is no assistance from people. Like human-beings, facial expressions and body motions are indispensable parts of robots to show their pleasure, anger, surprise, frustration, etc., although it is still a difficulty for nowadays technology to allow them to display full facial emotions. Interestingly, however, we have already had Eliza, Kismet, and Sony robot dogs, which are computer-driven machines or robots with certain emotions. They benefit us a lot and enrich our lives.   

And, another questions was also raised by Norman which need to be further explored and examined in the future research: How do robots detect human-beings’ emotions and how to determine the most appropriate way of responding? In other words, while we struggle to determine how to make machines respond appropriately to signs of emotions, people aren’t particularly good at it either, as it is so common for people to be insensitive to emotional states of others, even to misunderstand their own friends. Back to me, I sometimes misunderstood my friends and could not figure it out caused by culture issues. Therefore, it is a huge challenge to allow robots to respond us properly and perfect. But, I still dream big and I am definitely optimistic to the future development of science and technology.

Personally, Norman’s robots recall me of Wall-E, an adorable robot as the leading character in Disney movie “Wall-E” of 2008. He is dutiful, optimistic, compassionate and righteous. He not only has a feeling with a seedling plant, but falls in love with another female robot, which usually happened in human-beings. Obviously, the filmmaker applied an image of robot to represent human-beings as well as to express our dreams. From Wall-E, we saw ourselves. From this movie, I could also see that emotions make everything possible. With high-tech development, who can deny that there will be a real Wall-E with us in future?

I am not a fan of science fiction, but one day, I still wish I had my own robot, somewhat akin to man Friday. She could be a good housekeeper in my house, meanwhile, she could emotionally interact with me and provide me with assistance like a buddy. Frankly, I don’t like the look of Kismet at all, which is showed in Figure 6.6, p192. It is not cute and lovely, to some extent, a bit ugly. I prefer my robot looks like a fancy doll, at least looks like Wall-E—Oh, sorry, it is my own emotional interpretation.