| Cynthia Breazeal here presents her vision of the sociable robot of the future, a synthetic creature and not merely a sophisticated tool. A sociable robot will be able to understand us, to communicate and interact with us, to learn from us and grow with us. It will be socially intelligent in a humanlike way. Eventually sociable robots will assist us in our daily lives, as collaborators and companions. Because the most successful sociable robots will share our social characteristics, the effort to make sociable robots is also a means for exploring human social intelligence and even what it means to be human.
Breazeal defines the key components of social intelligence for these machines and offers a framework and set of design issues for their realization. Much of the book focuses on a nascent sociable robot she designed named Kismet. Breazeal offers a concrete implementation for Kismet, incorporating insights from the scientific study of animals and people, as well as from artistic disciplines such as classical animation. This blending of science, engineering, and art creates a lifelike quality that encourages people to treat Kismet as a social creature rather than just a machine. The book includes a CD-ROM that shows Kismet in action.
I remember seeing themovie StarWars as a little girl. I remember being absolutely captivated and fascinated by the two droids, R2-D2 and C-3P0. Their personalities and their antics made them compelling characters, far different from typical sci-fi robots. I actually cared about these droids, unlike the computer HAL, from Arthur C. Clarke’s book 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose cool intelligence left me with an eerie feeling. I remember the heated debates among my classmates about whether the droids were real or not. Some would argue that because you could see the wires in C-3P0’s torso that it must be a real robot. Alas, however, the truth was known. They were not real at all. They existed only in the movies. I figured that I would never see anything like those robots in my lifetime. |
