Domesticated Robots And The Art Of Being Human

These little robots, called BlabDroids, ask people questions and video record their replies. The footage will be used to create a documentary. Courtesy of Alexander Reben hide caption

These little robots, called BlabDroids, ask people questions and video record their replies. The footage will be used to create a documentary.

In the 1960s well before Spike Jonze's Samantha MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum introduced the world to Eliza, a psychotherapist (of sorts) who interacted with people through a text interface. She's still around today.

In preparing this post, I asked her what makes us human. "Are such questions on your mind often?" she replied.

Eliza is a computer program one of the first "chat bots" and an example of early artificial intelligence. While today's natural language processors are far more sophisticated, Eliza was an achievement in her day; having a conversation with her can be surprisingly intimate, personal, humorous and uncanny. She's no replacement for a human psychotherapist, of course, but she succeeds in teaching us something about ourselves. That's because human-machine interactions don't simply reflect how good we are as engineers they also reveal something about the kinds of creatures we are as humans.

Alexander Reben is an MIT-trained roboticist and artist. Courtesy of Alexander Reben hide caption

Alexander Reben is an MIT-trained roboticist and artist.

With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations.

For one project, Reben created BlabDroids: adorable little robots that roam the world asking people questions, such as what they regret or what created the moon. In collaboration with filmmaker Brent Hoff, Reben will use the footage to create a documentary, Robots in Residence, whose roots go straight back to Weizenbaum's Eliza. On his website, Reben explains:

Robots in Residence, the world's first documentary shot and directed entirely by pre-programmed robots [the BlabDroids], will attempt to forge a new form of documentary storytelling and in doing so experimentally test MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's infamous "Eliza effect" which is "the tendency to unconsciously assume computer (i.e. pre-programmed) behaviors are analogous to human behaviors." "I had not realized," Weizenbaum later noted, "that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people." We shall see.

Follow this link:
Domesticated Robots And The Art Of Being Human