Emotional Machines
By ai-depot | May 18, 2003
A personal view on the differences and similarities between humans and AI, underlining the need for machines capable of emotions in modern society.
Written by Nitin Mendiratta.
Emotional Machines
The article overviews the past, present and future of the conceptual machines with emotional intelligence. Past covers the background, the debate and discussions whether Man is a Machine. Can machines be creative? How intelligent are human beings? Can machines match the reality? Or is it all an headache without a head? The Present outlines how far we have come and why the time has come for society to build emotional machines. Further, it also gives an introduction to emotion modeling, generation and expression in forms that would be most acceptable to society. It elaborates some of the attributes and features could make machines more human like. Last but not the least, an inspirational for the future. A short note to all the people who are intrigued by the idea of Artificial Intelligence.
Introduction
Today, people are interacting more and more with computers. Life is running at a microchip speed. If all computers are stopped for a day, complete civilization comes to a halt! Fifty years ago, this might’ve been a science fiction, but today it is a reality. Further, with Computers being embedded in all of our life accessories like mobiles, watches, cars, even our bodies and brains there is no indication that this microchip speed will not be multiplied in the future.
Over the last decade, these electronic tiny minuscule signals have fundamentally revolutionized the way we live. People are spending more hours per day with machines than humans. An amazing a human-machine relationship is developing. So far this bond has been one sided because the ability to generate, recognize and express emotions are a unique prerogative of living human beings. If this intelligence or abstract attribute could be taught to machines, it would re-conceptualize the perception of machines. It will fundamentally change the way we will life, in the third millennium.
We taught machines how to read, speak and understand humans by voices, actions and events. Now we are fast approaching a stage where we will have to impart intelligence to make these non biological machines a part of living beings family. Further, diminishing the difference between living and non living, biological and non biological. The intelligence attributes could be Emotions, Creativity and Spirituality. Society will not restrict scientists from migrating human attributes into machines because eventually most of the people will want the indefinite life span and better services from these machines with increased intelligence. And also a new ability of machines to change with time and users.
Internet is converging all the specialized fields or colors of knowledge into one bright light. The avalanche of new users getting online is still growing. People from all across the planet are spending more and more hours surfing the net, especially in chat rooms, use net groups and bulletin boards. Chat Servers are the unique platform where interactivity the intelligence and interactivity of humans and machines coincides. There have been some heroic individual efforts to realize chat bots, who would talk and behave like humans. If this is any indication of people’s openness to talking and sharing emotions through and with machines, then we are seeing the tip of the emotional machine iceberg.
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