How Close Are We Really Artificial Intelligence?

The ability to identify emotion and carry it out into one’s daily life is what defines an individual as human; if one lacks emotion, then the individual will become a robot of society. Emotion is defined as a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one’s circumstances, mood, or relationships with others

People are shaped into individuals through many defining attributes – from the way we communicate and the way we express ourselves to a person’s morals and ethics. Coincidentally, these are all linked through one major omniscient trait – emotions. Emotions contain a wide spectrum of subcategories, but these can basically be broken down into the two elementary divisions: happiness and sadness. These ups and downs are crucial for people to be themselves; to have their own stories and experiences to tell.

The book, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, is a Science Fiction Comedy that tells the story of a man named Arthur Dent and his experience with space travel. After waking to a bulldozer on his front lawn ready to charge, Arthur’s best friend, an alien disguised as an out of work actor, Ford Perfect, reassures Arthur that the sad demise of his house is nothing compared to the destruction of earth in the next ten minutes. With people all around the world scrambling for safety, and even placing brown paper bags on their heads and laying on the floor, Ford decided that the only way he and Arthur can survive is to hitch a ride with the aliens that are destroying their home. The next two-hundred pages tell the story of Arthur and Ford in space, of course with their towel (every hitchhiker has one), trying not to die from the wrath of multiple alien species.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, a man named Arthur Dent is taken from Earth moments before Earth was blown up by an extraterrestrial race. Arthur was “abducted” by his friend very serious but sarcastic friend Ford Prefect, who is also an extraterrestrial. After mourning his planet's destruction, Arthur is introduced to the galaxy by being thrown off the ship in space by the same extraterrestrial race that blew up Earth. Just before Arthur and Ford perish in space, a star cruiser picks them up in the nick of time. The passengers of the spaceship include Zaphod Beeblebrox a president who’s a terrorist, and his girlfriend Trillian. These four traverse the galaxy and avoid the police and bounty hunters which want Zaphod

Society today is greatly influenced by technology and the impact it has had within the past 20 years. One of the largest breakthroughs, though, is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). The technology associated with A.I. has greatly developed in the past years, and is only making devices smarter. When someone mentions technology, or even the technological breakthroughs the world has gone through recently, many people go straight to smartphones and computers. A.I. is often overlooked, or put into a general category of "technology". Yet, artificial intelligence is something that should we not be so quick to dismiss, and should be something that gets people talking and even excited for what the future holds.

This lack of affinity constitutes the basis of the post-apocalyptic society’s ideological values towards the progression of artificial intelligence given the technology’s progression towards a more humanistic appearance but inherent lack of humanistic qualities. Dick’s perception of this trend in the advancement of artificial intelligence serves as a foresight into that of our own society- the notion of which Mori explores in his discussion of the “uncanny valley”.

Picking up hitchhikers isn’t safe nowadays. However, this is one hitchhiker that’s too adorable to pass by. The cute, little hitchhiking humanoid robot is from Canada and wants to hitchhike his way across America. David Harris Smith, a professor of communication at McMaster University, Ontario and Frauke Zeller an assistant professor of communication at Ryerson University are the creators of hitchBOT. The two professors created hitchBOT for the sole purpose of studying the culture and limitations of human kindness. Furthermore, they were interested in studying artificial intelligence.

Since emotions are something that every human needs to experience for internal nourishment, it comes to no surprise that individuals are allowing themselves to be triggered emotionally by robots. Social robots are artificially engineered to interact with human beings as if they were alive because they are programmed to do so. These interactions can trigger emotions from within an individual 's, because our world so reliant on technology that people no longer know how to rely on one another. For instance, Turkle shares an incident involving a Furby and a seven-year-old girl when she mentions that, “After a month with her Furby, Bianca, seven, speaks with growing confidence about their mutual affection: ‘I love my Furby because it loves me…. It was like he really knew me.’” (471). This proves that interactive robots create a false sense of a living relations with its owner. Like Bianca, many children have the same experiences with their interactive toys and these artificial relationships allow technology to assume a large role in their lives at a young age. Since these toys like Furby cannot authentically express emotions they are not capable to love, but since it has been programmed to behave a certain way children are convinced that these robots truly do love them. These robots are designed to target certain emotional responses from its user and for this

Humans and the AI possible now, are truly one and the same What does this mean?. The Human body is but a foundry sundry? of systems and preconditioned thinking that is lead through cause and effect. AI is the pinnacle of humanity’s attempts at mimicking the creation of life through “artificial” thinking.

When shown photos of human faces exhibiting different emotions, dogs are also able to recognize the differences between photos. Rather than just studying dogs displaying learned behaviors, psychologists studied abstract representations of positive and negative emotion states in dogs. Seventeen dogs were shown pairs of pictures of either a happy or angry person and were also played either playful or aggressive

A robot’s affective state can be assessed on several levels, such as its contextual understanding of the world, the appropriateness of the affective responses it displays, and the degree to which it expresses an affective state. To perform these assessments, robot designers can actually employ some of the same techniques as described in the Section 4.1, particularly ethnographic observation, interviews and surveys. The difference is that the robot becomes the focus of evaluation instead of the user, and its affective expression is what is measured. Subjects are usually given emotion recognition tests - specific tasks that subject them to the various affective states of the robot for which they have to identify the displayed emotion. For example,

Perception has played an immense role in shaping what it means to be human. Our ability to perceive has given humans the ability to cognate at a higher level than any other animal and has given us the evolutionary advantage needed to progress our species. However, as technology has advanced and caught up to humans in the ability to think, it presses us to think of another dividing line that makes us into humans and leaves technology behind as just robots. This line is our ability to react emotionally to what we perceive. We are able to feel, which is the ability to have an emotional response to the environment we are perceiving. Any robot can now interpret its environment and make adjustments based on what the input was, but while doing this, robots are not able to sense what they are perceiving. In Sherry Turkle’s "Selections from Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other", she discusses what it takes for a computer to be close enough to be alive, and brings up the question of what is missing to make them the same as humans. Oliver Sacks also brings up interesting stories of how people’s experiences can bring them to question what it means to be alive, in his story “The Mind’s Eye”. Also in Ethan Watters’ “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan”, he brings up that going through tumultuous emotions associated with things such as suffering, love, and death are what it means to be human. While the ability to perceive is not a unique

For my topic I chose to talk about affective behaviors of humans and animals. I chose this topic because I thought it would be interesting to see why humans and animals act the way they do. During this paper we will look at multiple cases and other research about affective neuroscience in humans and animals. The outcome of this paper is for you as well as I to gain some insight on why we involuntary act the way we do.

Recognition of face expressions and emotions may help to improve interactions with a robot or any intelligent machine in socially assistive robotics and computational behavioral science, or to study people’s social engagement in any collaborative tasks.

If a robot shows a human trait or emotion or not an emotion it will still make for an effective animation.