Robot stories have been around for ages. In 1495 Leonardo Da Vinci designed the Mechanical Knight, a humanoid automation for the battlefield. Early cases of “social robots” in its broadest meaning is given by the ancient author Ovid (43 BC–17 AD) in his Metamorphoses (Transformations). Pygmalion, in disgust of women’s imperfection, focused all his passion and time to the creation of an ivory statue of his female ideal. He then fell in love with his own creation. He treated it like an idealized female companion, offering gifts and even sharing his bed with it. In Western Europe, there are other elaborated automated figures again in early modern times, like the moving mechanical monk from sixteenth century at the German Museum at Munich. The late eighteenth century “mechanical Turk” or “automaton chess player.” is another famous one (of course its intelligence for chess is not artificial; the real player was hidden inside to operate the machine. In any case, the dream of robots is not just a recent one. Yet, in most historical contexts, they were mostly used to delight and also to fear humans.
Now, with an accumulation of knowledge-innovation in AI, robots have acquired to enter in- extractably in many spheres of our daily lives. They are everywhere. They are highly visible. They are highly social, designated to interact with us, to exhibit social behaviors such as recognizing, following and assisting their owners and engaging in conversation. They are getting their solid, permanent place in hospitals, schools, homes, airports, hotels, streets… Their functions include entertainment, edutainment, providing assistance, motivation, encouragement, monitoring safety… They can sing, dance, play, they are domesticated, attentive companions, assistants, they may be used as an avatar of a diseased kid, of an elderly or of physically-impaired people. They can remind people about their medical conditions and medicaments, promote exercise, lead yoga sessions, relaxation routines, keep basic conversation, help to identify, modify and mirror emotions in order to relieve stress, enhance positive emotions, help to manage PTSD, diabetes, stroke rehabilitation. Skillful helpers for clinical and non-clinical populations!
I guess, especially in health care settings their accounts are multiplexed. Patient registration, testing, pre-diagnosis, delivering supplies such as meals, medications, removing dirty bedding, giving location indications, translating and enabling multiple language conversations are among the first comers. But, in my opinion being a patient simulator is electrifying. The androids can blink, cry, bleed, moan, complain of pain, have organ sounds, pulse, simulate facial expressions, show fear, anxiety, or move. To train medical students they are brillant.
We are on the highway towards the widespread use of robots. Higher up than there is an important fact that people anthropomorphize (attributing human charactersitics) social robots. In other words people have the same sensitivity when communicating with robots as they do with humans, without distinguishing between human and robot (1, 2, 3). Thus, the human-robot interaction (HRI) habitat deserves much more focus from researchers and the habitat is in a trans-disciplinary field. The factors that may influence HRI should be well identified, traced and simulated in order to prevent any degradation of human well-being. This area of focus gains further importance as it develops in a learning by doing format. We will be able to see its impacts only in time similar to smart phones cognitive and linguistic impacts which can only be seen also in time (4).
Such an important, unstoppable, exciting and playful area! Especially in terms of human psychee.
References:
(1) Nomura, T., Kanda, T., & Suzuki, T. (2006). Experimental investigation into influence of
negative attitudes toward robots on human–robot interaction. Ai & Society, 20, 138-150.
(2) Melson, G. F., Kahn Jr, P. H., Beck, A., & Friedman, B. (2006). Toward understanding
children’s and adults’ encounters with social robots. In Paper to the AAAI Workshop on Human
Implications of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Boston.
(3) Lee, K. M., Park, N., & Song, H. (2005). Can a robot be perceived as a developing creature?
Effects of a robot’s long‐term cognitive developments on its social presence and people’s social
responses toward it. Human communication research, 31(4), 538-563.
(4) Seibt, J., Damholdt, M. F., & Vestergaard, C. (2020). Integrative social robotics, value-
driven design, and transdisciplinarity.
Interaction Studies, 21
(1), 111-144.