If we can be emotionally attached to lamps, we can be emotionally attached to robots

Robots can be thought of as enemies, or at least as competitors coming after our jobs. At best, you might think a robot might perform unpleasant or dangerous tasks that you wouldn’t want to do at any price. But that’s changing, and robots are increasingly poised to become your friends. In fact, Cynthia Breazeal of the MIT Media Lab and founder of Jibo Inc. proposes putting a social robot in every home.

Addressing attendees of ESC Boston on Thursday, Breazeal said she became interested in robots at age 10, when R2D2 and C3PO took to the screen in Star Wars. As is often the case, she said, cultural ideas are shaped by science fiction before we can realize the envisioned technology. The Star Wars robots, she said, are full-fledged characters who can perform tasks and interact with people.

She described the mobile computing revolution as a driving force for the advancement of robotics, providing the cameras and processors that are critical building blocks. She added that the initial robots for the home—such as the Nest thermostat and Roomba vacuum cleaner—are utilitarian. They have relationships with air and dirt, respectively—not people. They are basically appliances with increased autonomy.

Breazeal’s goal is a robot that can develop a relationship with a family—not dirt and air. To that end, she built Kismet during the period from 1997 to 2000—her first attempt to realize her vision of the Star Wars robots, producing a robot that someone who knows nothing about robotics could interact with. Such robots, she said, employ “socio emotive AI,” with psycho social perception, psycho social learning, psycho social interaction, and psycho social expression. They can identify interpersonal expressive cues that reveal states of mind, and they can understand and treat people as people.

Robots that are instilled with a theory of other minds and that can build rapport and emotional bond through high-touch engagement can be more than family friends—they can be coaches and counselors prompting improved outcomes. With such a robot, we would not feel we are interacting with a tool, she said. We would feel like we had someone in our corner.

Social robots could have a role to play in in health and wellness—facilitating weight management, for example. Behavior adherence is a huge issue, Breazeal said, explaining that 75% of every health dollar is spent on chronic disease, which can be exacerbated by poor diet and lack of exercise. If people receive long-term social support they can be more successful.

She then described Autom, a robotic social personal health coach who can live with you. She said experiments have shown that people remain engaged with Autom for much longer than with a paper log or even a tablet running an algorithm identical to Autom’s. Users seemed to bond with Autom, outfitting her with hats, and they exhibited something like separation anxiety when the Automs were retrieved at the end of the experiments.

Breazeal said that robots can serve as a wellness hub—offering a humanized interface to the IoT. She emphasized that a robot like Autom won’t replace a human coach but can be present every day to augment weekly or monthly meetings with humans.

Social robots also have a role in education, including early childhood learning.  The most effective use of an educational dollar is in the first five years of life, where education sets the stage for success. A five-year-old starting behind will never catch up without very expensive intervention, Breazeal said.

Early exposure to oral language is particularly important, she said, as it leads to empathy and academic success. And whereas a child of professional parents will be exposed cumulatively to about 50 million words in its first 48 months, a child growing up in a household receiving welfare benefits will on average experience a 32 million-word shortfall over the same period, she said. Interactive robots that can tell stories and play games can help close the gap.

Of particular importance is curiosity—children can benefit from exposure to a robot willing to try things, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. Also important is a robot that can adjust its vocabulary to the level of the child using it—children learn best from a robot peer, not a robot using an extensive vocabulary the child cannot understand.

Breazeal also described Huggable, a robot used at Boston Children’s Hospital to ease children’s anxiety during hospital visits. Huggable, she said, reacts on an emotional level with children. Currently, Huggable is tele-operated by an expert from BCH Child Life Services, but researchers are working on increasing its autonomy. As with Autom, the goal is not to replace human practitioners but to augment their efforts.

Finally, she commented on Jibo, the forthcoming social robot from the company she founded. She likened Jibo to the offspring of R2D2 and an iPad and called it the world’s first family robot. It’s expected to be commercially available in early to mid-2016 at a high-end-tablet price point. Third-party developers will be a huge engine driving Jibo’s success, she said, and she added that 30% developers expressing interest so far are women—a high percentage for the field.

You can read more and see videos of Jibo in action at http://www.jibo.com/. And you can read about the business case for Jibo at Forbes.

I have no doubt that social robots will find a market, whether in the home (Jibo and Autom), the hospital, the school, or elsewhere. Despite Breazeal’s observation that Roomba is important only because of its relationship with dirt, as I have reported earlier humans have already developed emotional bonds with the robotic vacuum cleaner. For that matter, the director Spike Jonze proved back in 2002 that we can develop an emotional attachment to a discarded desk lamp.

On a related note, back in 2008 while attending the Silicon Valley version of ESC I had a chance to see an exhibit titled “Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon” at the San Jose Museum of Art. “We were promised robots” was the lament of the artist Michael A. Salter in a statement that served as a subtitle to the exhibit. As I wrote at the time, “So what, exactly, was promised that wasn’t delivered? According to an exhibit handout, many people ‘…grew up imagining a future populated by friendly humanoid robots that would help us with our homework, mow our lawns, even cook our meals.’ The crux of that statement is that people were looking for friendship from their robots as much as service.” It seems that researchers like Breazeal are ready to deliver the friendship aspect.