Transcript Emergence and Affect in Computing

Emotion and Affect in
Computing
CHID 370/COM
302
Winter 2007
Opening Pandora’s Box
• Step 1-The bomb and the technological
consequences
• Step 2-Technology and market society
contribute to make the “real” and
“virtual” indistinguishable (in some
cases)
• Step 3-Understanding the dynamics of
extensively linked human and computer
systems
New understandings
• Step 4-Computers help us understand
dynamics beyond our scale of
comprehension
– New Spaces-Networks and power laws
– New Times-Simulation and emergent
properties
A “feeling” for the future
• New understandings of the world call for
new conceptions of “the human”
– Understanding the depth of our
interdependence on the world and
technological objects
– Which technologies?
– And how do we use them?
– Is this purely a rational decision?
Intelligence?
• Deep Blue (1997)-Chess playing
– Once the paradigm for thinking about artificial
intelligence
– Baroque systems more of interest
– Rodney Brooks
• “Elephants don’t play chess”
• “ You know, when Gary Kasparov was beaten by Deep
Blue, he said, "Well, at least it didn't enjoy beating me." I
certainly think, as most molecular biologists think, that we
are fundamentally machines. We're made out of biomolecules that interact in a rule-like manner. So if we are
emotional machines, then I don't see any reason, in
principle, why we can't build silicon and steel machines
that have emotions.”
– How do we build back up?
Emotions?
• Will there be computers with emotions?
• Is it fair to expect other aspects of the world
to feel things the way that we do?
• How do you understand feeling beyond a
human dimension?
• In Woodward, emotions serve as a means of
coupling self to world--what are the ways that
technological objects couple self to world?
Affect
• The capacity to affect or be affected
• Not just emotions but the capacity to feel and
express them
• Descartes-clear and distinct reasoning
– Clear mind and body split
• Spinoza-mind and body are substance
– Reasoning needs the body
• Many functions take place at a pre-cognitive
level
Mike the Headless Chicken
• 1945-46
• http://www.miketheh
eadlesschicken.org/
Role of affect in decision
making
• Need to feel before one can think
– Having an emotion tells one about one’s
relationship to the world
• Fear
• Information not just from messages-from
emotional cues
– Inflection of voice
– Gestures
– Empathy
Affective Computing
• Computers are limited as
thinking machines if they
don’t possess the ability
to recognize emotions
• Registering and
responding to an emotion
is affect (although not
sentience)
Rosalind Picard, Head
of MIT’s affective
computing group
Goals of affective computing
• Make computers better social decision
makers
– Voice message hears your frustration
• Act as emotion communicators
– An affect “phone” would register your
feelings and communicate them to your
partner
• Help understand the complexity of
human affect
Projects
• First pattern and motion recognition
• Trisk
QuickTime™ and a
H.264 decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Putting it together
• Kismet
QuickTime™ and a
Sorenson Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Response
QuickTime™ and a
Sorenson Video decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Emotion
Proto conversation
Not purely comforting
irobot corp.
http://www.irobot.com/
Re-inscribes old relationships
between the Department of
Defense and AI
Military Industrial Complex
Military Entertainment Complex
Military Domestic Complex?
Ideas
• Understand how emotions couple us to
the world
• Use emotions in our own “navigation” of
informational technologies in tandem
with the rational . . . Think of them as
separate stages in making a decision
– Analogous to writing a paper
• Use computers to feel the world, I.e. to
increase understanding