Today morning I was just wondering if robots could emote. Yaah, emote is the verb, a new word which means to be able to have emotions. Emotions are just tiny little thoughts in you brain, may be left part, that are capable of carrying huge amounts of positive or negative energies. Have you ever read this kind of definition of emotions?
This definition I came about when I was reading an article in Sunday newspaper in that regular spiritual column. The write said that e-motions stand for energy-in-motion. That was great, that gives some insight and a starting point to understand human brain, mind and thinking process.
Basically, human brain functions just to map a certain sort of action to certain sort of reaction thoughout its life. Imagine, if somebody slaps you real hard in the face, most probably you would say “uhh..that hurts” and hit back (I would do that…). It is because somewhere in your ‘Hard’ coded brain you have stored this reaction and now you just used it. This mapping might have take just a single second because its not real hard to recollect in your brain that the slap hurt you.
But do you wonder why some reactions would take several minutes, hours or days? These reactions or the coded path that produces this reaction might involve some transmission of emotions (just a plausibility). So, if robots have to able to emote, then the map between actions and reactions must be long and clumsy. Take a deep breath and read again. If this path is too long, imagine what a robot would go through? He would go through gathering all its previous similar experiences and collect the reaction database and finally summarize its goodness and badness. Yaah…exactly..there is your emotion…..good or bad? Positive or negative?
It means to be able to emote , there must be a collective search through data base and then finally summarizing to produce a plus or a minus. And if this searching and summing is rather fuzzy, the relation would vary depending on the ‘mood’ of the robot. What do you say? Will this work? Why don’t we give it a try?
Last, but why do we want robots to think like humans and have emotions? The answer depends on the purpose the robots would server in the future. Are we creating artificial human life on the earth or are we easing human job by fusing in robots? Because the whole bussiness of emotions is a little to painful? Don’t we know that already?
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@Welcome gundappa
You surely need a brk !! if such thoughts encroach you mind that too in the Morning .. u need an outing!
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Ans to question of the need to fill in emotions into Robo perhaps lies infuture, as by then we all shall be ‘Living alone’ , as today we tend to find ‘our space’ in overcrowded room.
Thanks dude… for the comment..finally somebody read that…
Ya…well that I thought way back some time (not today)…
Surely, in future….I guess! The purpose of embedding emotions is actually more for diagnostic and behavioral analysis …rather than entertainment or creating parallel world.
And yes..is it actually happening?
http://www.mahalo.com/Emotibots
i think that the human psyche itself is so complex and of varied nature that analysis of human behaviour by mapping it to some machine is next to impossible. Also i feel that it is not necessary. The basic purpose behind making Robots is to perform computational and physical tasks that are out of reach of normal human capacity and consistency.
Is Robotics planning to go along the way of animation ?? In primitive animation we had just moving figures but it matured to become 3D and also depict humanlike emotions. If robots are also available as emotibots then i guess we will find them more as entertaining and serving as technopets.