Emotional Robots

From http://www.techrepublic.com/article/angelica-lim-flutist-global-roboticist-proud-master-of-a-robot-dalmatian-named-sparky/

Angelica Lim is a developer at Alderbarn Robotics in Paris. In this article by TechRepublic they interviewed her on her work with robots. She has been working on teaching robots to recognize emotions by teaching them facial expressions, like how babies learn. Her work with emotional robots started with making robots that could play music. (An example of one such robot is here). The researchers found that even when the robots played the notes perfectly it did not match how a human player would play. So they have stared to work on adding emotion to robots.  Some emotion responsive robots have been developed already. one such robot is NAO, which is a robot that helps teach autistic children about emotions and social interactions. (You can see video about project here.) Not everyone approves of emotional robots thought. Sherry Turkle objects to giving robots emotion because they can not really feel emotion so are just pretending. She believes that this pretending to care would be damaging to children and elderly, the two age groups most often identified as benefiting from a robot companion. 

I thought that this was a very interesting topic.  Thinking about how they would go about programming the robots to recognize and react to emotions seems that it would be even more difficult than a chat bot. The idea of being able to use robots to teach autistic children about emotions is also interesting. The article talks about how the robots work well for this because they present fewer signals that the children have to interpret. We often focus on making robots more human but this shows that there are times when a robots limitations are a benefit. As for Turkle's objection that having robots with emotions would be damaging because they are pretending, I don't really understand her point. She does not go into detail on her objection and that may be part of it. To me the robot is not trying to trick the person, they are following their programming. Her fear seems connected to the fear shown in the first in the first short story in I, Robot, that people will not be able to distinguish between a person and robot or prefer robots to people.  I think that children would learn to interact with people, and robots could help for that. If the elderly feel like their only companion is a robot then I that says more about how we treat elderly people than the dangers of robots.