You’re probably familiar with Spot, a dog-like robot without so much as a head,
and the initial reaction to its unveiling, which was … not great.
'I don’t know about this … this reminds me of Will Smith in iRobot.'
'It’s like he’s staring at your soul or something.'
'We should have stopped them.'
But if Spot had had a cute robot face … cuter ...
Would it change how we perceive it?
'Hi! Oh you’re a good boy.'
When videos were released showing robot
dogs being kicked, they provoked an outpouring of sympathy.
'Why do you ‘aww’ it’s a robot!'
So if different interactions with these autonomous headless beasts
could inspire such radically contradictory emotions ...
Why do robots have faces at all?
Unlike the growing number of robots we rely on but do not interact with,
social robots are widely designed with a face, despite not actually using it to perform
their functions.
'Sex comprises only a small portion of my capabilities.'
Well, I guess some need a face ...
The fact that faces are so common
is partly explained by our cultural mistrust of robots,
often seen as a threat to our jobs - perhaps even our very existence.
'Well then I guess we’re going to miss the good old days.'
'What good old days?'
'When people were killed by other people.'
Giving a robot the right sort of face can make them appear friendly, trustworthy, safe.
'I’m ticklish today.'
Being able to emulate human characteristics will enable humans to be able
to develop emotional attachment and empathy for the agent.
I think that as digital agents become more and more part of society,
we will naturally build trust with them because they'll become reliable.
They'll do what they're meant to do.
'We can do this together.'
'... OK'
But mitigating the perceived threat is only one reason why faces are handy.
One of the issues with self-driving cars is that they seem unpredictable.
When crossing a road in front of
a slow moving vehicle we look for prompts from the driver,
who, assuming they aren’t a psychopath, will usually respond like this.
Take away the visual clues and it becomes much harder to predict
what the car might do - and for the car to predict what we might do.
When we are designing these tools for human use, we have to understand which features are going
to elicit given responses in humans.
And that's really psychology.
So if we want humans to pay attention to something then social signals are one way to be very
effective.
We're used to looking at eyes for understanding where someone's directing their attention
this would be a very effective signal to use in something like a car.
As opposed to a completely unique and novel signal that we all then have
to learn, why not just use those that we already know?
So faces are pretty useful and plenty of research
has gone into how they should look.
In 2018 the Human-centred robotics lab at Washington University conducted
the largest ever study of robot faces.
So we took the most common feature and created the median face.
What was the most common background colour?
It was black.
What was the most common size of eyes, etc.
And then we varied one feature at a time.
So if a robot didn't have eyes, we didn't consider it a face.
If it has a mouth, people might expect that it speaks.
'Hnnng Ngrrr'
The functionality of the robots comes first.
So for a robot for children and entertainment and education,
you want friendliness vs, for security robots, you want trustworthiness.
And what our findings help with is which types of faces might project those attributes.
But such research into digital faces does nothing
to stop more realistic humanoid robots being created,
with designs that travel deep into the uncanny valley.
This concept was coined in 1970 by Japanese professor Masahiro Mori,
to describe the phenomenon that as robots become more lifelike,
they become more appealing to us humans.
Aww cute. Do you want a lift?
Until, that is, they reach the valley itself, a point of uncanny resemblance
that swiftly provokes eerie feelings of unease and downright zombified dread.
Yeah, um, sorry … the bus is full.
Fortunately we swiftly head back out the other side
of the valley with the arrival of real-life healthy
and completely normal human people.
Phew.
But the concept is not exactly universally consistent.
But does this empathetic approach risk undermining what makes us human?
It looks like he agrees with you.
Whatever a robot looks like, the people it interacts with will inevitably
anthropomorphise its behaviour,
to the point we begin to credit it with greater sentience
than is really the case: the so-called ELIZA effect.
I mean, we made this one prime minister!
'Strong and stable.'
One of the most famous humanoid robots is Sophia, modelled on Audrey Hepburn,
part robot ambassador, part PR stunt.
'She’s basically alive, is that what you’re saying?'
'Uh yeah, yeah.'
And even more basically - she isn’t - her ‘intelligence’ is widely
acknowledged to be a facade.
'If Sophia was just an art piece I would have no problem with it.
But it’s presented as something else.'
Nevertheless, Sophia ended up being granted
Saudi citizenship in a double whammy of cunning PR stuntery,
meaning she now enjoys the same freedoms as other Saudi women.
Perhaps all this is an argument against giving robots faces at all.
Perhaps we need inbuilt reminders that though these are sophisticated machines,
they are not living beings.
'Oh it doesn’t make any sense to me.'
'Of course not, you’re a robot.'
Humans will anthropomorphise very basic, even two-dimensional,
non-coloured shapes like circles and squares and triangles.
These are just shapes moving around in a space.
So humans have this propensity to make sense of their world in terms
of their own experiences of the world.
Which brings us back to Spot, which didn’t even need a face to be uncanny,
to invoke feelings of fear and sympathy.
Robots are designed to inhabit the same world that living organisms have evolved to master.
A world we humans continue to shape to the benefit of our own design.
So regardless of what their face looks like, or if they even have one,
it seems inevitable that many robots
will have animalistic, if not downright human, design
and capabilities and we will continue
to see ourselves in them, for both good and bad ...
Leaving Spot to get on with more pressing matters.
'Please stand at least one metre apart, thank you.'