CMPT 105W Lecutre Notes, Lecture notes of Social Work

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CMPT 105W – Week 10

Social Robots

Dr. Felix Lo

Review from Last Week

What is a social robot? ¨ Social Robot = Robot that displays emotions ¨ Social Robot ≠ Robot with emotions ¨ Physical rather than virtual ¨ Ongoing research on their impact on human’s emotional state

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0h20jRA5M JIBO: First Social Robot for Home

Human’s Emotional Attachment to Social Robots

The ELIZA Effect

¨ ELIZA: one of first ever

chatbot programs

¨ Written in 1960s by

Joseph Weizenbaum

¨ Responses follow a script

(Hard-coded responses)

¨ Play the role of a

Rogerian

psychotherapist

Secretary’s emotional attachment to Eliza GET OUT!!! ¨ Weizenbaum’s secretary started chatting with ELIZA ¨ She shared intimate secrets with ELIZA. ¨ She grew emotionally attached to ELIZA. ¨ She told her boss to get out of her room! Weizenbaum: “ What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people .”

Therapeutic Benefits of Social Robots

Therapeutic Social Robots

for Elderlies

¨ Calm down emotionally agitated elderlies ¨ Motivate elderlies (e.g., to get out of bed) ¨ Act as a channel for elderlies to let out their frustration (feeling of abandonment)

Therapeutic Social Robots for Autistic children

Critiques of Social Robots

Sherry Turkle ¨ Head of MIT’s STS Dept (Science, Tech & Society) ¨ Life on the Screen (1997) & The Second Self (2005): positive view of computing ¨ Major claim: computers affect the way we think and see ourselves. ¨ Alone Together (2011): documenting her research on social robots ¨ Major argument: intimate relationship is undermined when people becomes confused between humans and robots.

Category Confusion

“Although we talk to our pets, buy them clothes, and fret over their illnesses, we do not have category confusions about them ... When you choose a pet over a person there is no need to represent the pet as a substitute human. This is decidedly not the case for [social robots, which] become useful just at the point when they became substitute human” ( Alone Together , p, 112)

Anthropomorphism

Asymmetric Relation of Intimacy symmetric asymmetric asymmetric