Notes from Don Norman Guest Lecture 10/28/04
Lowest level animals almost completely emotional all they have to
do is survive
Some people think emotion is an evolutionary left-over that we try to
overcome.
But we have the most fully developed emotional systems so they must be
good for something
Emotions often come first (two examples)
When were under stress, we focus: do an operation and it doesnt
work, do it again harder and harder (for example, if there is an
auditorium fire push on the door but it opens inward
people just keep pushing harder and harder). Stairs dont go all the way
to the basement to help people in fires otherwise just keep
running past the first floor and get stuck in the basement
Brainstorming take problems, want people to think about all
potential solutions give good food, play games and then start the
session. Say the first thing thats on your mind, nobody is allowed to
criticize want only positive in the room. Positivity leads to
more creative ideas
Emotion is important in how we do things and how we make decisions.
People without emotions are not good at living in the world.
Emotion as communication accident of evolution
Lizard primarily an emotional creature emotions are tightly
coupled to the muscles you can see that in a lizard, when its
relaxed in the sun/frightened. Because emotions and musculature are
coupled like this we can read the emotional state of someone else
we can tell if we are making someone else tense, so we can moderate the
way we interact with other people (good when bargaining, with enemies,
also useful when with friends).
Humans are the best at lying. Most animals/primates can lie, monkeys
try, but theyre not good at it. Apes do an ok job. Monkey will hide
food, but then stand there looking at it. Chimp will hide it and walk
away tries to fool the other animals.
In order to lie you have to put yourself in the mind of the other
person, you have to figure out what they are going to think
The face has 37 pairs of muscles some perform functions (eyelids)
but some seem to have evolved only for emotional communication. When we
try to lie (fake smiles, etc) it often isnt convincing cant
control all the muscles. Good actors cant even fake it, they need to
get themselves into the same emotional state.
2 or 3 reasons to model emotion
Scientific understanding
Want to build artificial devices (artificial humans want
them to have emotions) entertainment industry, want things on
screen to behave in a realistic and natural way
Want to invent complex machines that go around the workplace or
home those machines will need emotions to be successful.
Slides
1. Theory of Emotion
2. Emotional expression as social communication
3. existing robots
4. emotional robots
5. determining human evolution (we didnt cover this part)
Three levels of processing
Visceral [sensory input/motor output]
Behavioral [sensory input/motor output]
Reflective
Visceral is stuff that is pre-wired born with it
Behavioral is where our skills are
Visceral and behavioral take in sensory input and control the muscles
The reflective level is internal consciousness doesnt take
in input or cause output
It sees the other levels of acting can think about and correct
other levels (saying something and wondering why you did it)
Reflective level tries to control the other levels that control signal
is called WILL
Most of the time you use conscious control is when doing a skill you
havent done successfully before (first learning a sport, how to drive).
Reflection is a slow process (tenths of a second) other processes are
measured in millisecond
Reflection can only do one thing at a time (serial operation)
Other levels can do many things at once (parallel operation)
Will is how you make yourself do things you dont want to and how you
make yourself not do things that you ordinarily would (on a diet with
chocolate cake in front of you)
Will is an inhibiting behavior, trying to override the other levels.
You can only do this while you are not distracted. If you get
distracted, automatic circuits will take over
Visceral can recognize when someone is scolding/praising you even
if you dont understand the words (dogs, babies) has to do with
patterns of voice
We have co-evolved with our emotions
Emotions control muscles, as our cognitive systems developed we learned
to read the musculature of other animals interpret meanings
behind it. Now we even assign emotions to inanimate objects to try to
explain things
Robot video camera high in the air so it can see more things,
wheels at the bottom so it can move, heavy stuff at the bottom
its design is functional like people
Most common kind of robot is industrial but not what everyday
person thinks about
We think of things like Aibo
does learn and change its behavior but it doesnt understand language
Sony did a good job of making it a puppy
fails frequently, falls over frequently instead of saying what
stupid technology, people say oh how cute.
Aibo really does nothing but people love it
Roomba (iRobot) Rod Brooks from MIT Costs $60 to make
hardest part was making it work reliably the vacuuming part
intelligence is minimal 60 bits of code. Goes in a spiral until it
bumps into something it reverses and modifies its behavior slightly No
memory whatsoever
Lots of things are more intelligent than the Roomba coffee maker
(um, he did point out that his coffee maker cost more than a Roomba, so
I hope it makes *really* good coffee)
Kismet most other emotional robots right now are all fake.
Emotional categories (happy, sad, etc) are fake made up by
people that isnt how we work.
The real way to exhibit emotions is by controlling the underlying state
You dont want a robot that makes believe it is happy and smiles you
want to control the underlying state and have it say this is a good
situation and then relax thats what happy really is
Kismet actually driven by emotion, whole purpose is to interact with
other people.
High level perceptual system.
Affective assessment (affect is technical term for emotion)
generates an emotional response interacts with physical system
No cognitive system no goal to be done entirely driven by
interacting with people
The question is: You can see why you might want to put emotions into
humanoid robots, and into characters in video games/animation, but what
about other electronic appliances?
Automobiles are getting more an more powerful and will soon be robots
(the Prius in Japan can park itself) cars do lots of stuff for you:
braking, cruise control Home appliances are becoming more and more
robotic washing machine, dryer, coffee machine
Should we put emotions into cars? What about coffee machines?
Maybe it hasnt been doing fine up until now? You still have to make a
lot of decisions
Most men cant manage washing clothes in current washing machines
too many choices most women just memorize a few settings
incredible variety of materials different temperatures, etc
Why does this require emotions?
What if you give two conflicting directions?
Reasons we might want machines with emotions:
Learning we learn from positive and negative experiences
Multitasking setting of priorities
Maintenance I havent been serviced in a year and a half,
and a motor is running out, I dont think I should do any more wash
What do you think emotion is?
Emotion is just another information processing system
Think of emotion as always evaluating what you are doing
Washing machine doesnt need emotions unless you want it to get better
over time, or if you want it to avoid doing harm
Emotions help you make priorities multitasking helps you
decide what to do
Robot coffee cup problem if you know what the problem is you can
always write a program to solve it
strong methods know the problem, direction of the solution
know the solution, just need to apply it
weak methods hill climbing I dont know what I should be doing,
rules of thumb/approximate methods
Emotion is always making value judgments: this is good I should keep
doing it or this is bad, I should find another way to do stuff before I
get hurt. This is a week method. Emotion will never be relevant if you
have a fixed device doing a fixed job that you understand well
coffee maker doesnt need emotions, you only need emotions in complex
environment with lots of stuff going on.