If humanoid robots learned to recognize and copy our emotions

A British company is working on a project in which it wants to give robots as much human expressions as possible. Its purpose is to “simplify” our interactions with them. The result was amazing, but also very annoying.

Anyone interested in science fiction has undoubtedly heard of Isaac Asimov. He is a Russian-American writer in his book I’m a robot It describes a human society served by a class of artificial human beings, which, however, is increasingly gaining a consciousness of its own. An innovative literary monument, which seems to have become a prophetic when compared to current developments of artificial intelligence and human-like mechanics. Another step in this direction has just been taken with research into robots that can express their feelings through face and body language.

smiling robot

This is an innovation where the British company engineering arts It’s running on its new bot called Ameca. Attention: This technology cannot be compared with the Russian company Promobot, which $200,000 Offers the right to imitate a person’s face on Android.

The Ameca is equipped with a full set of artificial facial muscles and exceptional precision in its movements to reproduce typical human expressions: shrugging shoulders, opening mouth suddenly, or even, what we can do alone in the animal kingdom, a gentle smile.

The goal is to provide us with a new interface to the digital world, which is essentially an alternative to the traditional screen. According to the company, this is in line with our natural way of communicating with each other.

“Instead of looking at screens and typing on keyboards, we should be able to interact with our technology in a more human way — machines should understand a smile, head movement or hand gesture,” Engnerd Arts said. IFLScience Know by e-mail. “Robots need faces and hands to communicate with us – because they are more natural and easy to understand.”

imitation of human behavior

Of course, Ameca does not express her feelings: the robot has learned to interpret and transcribe us using databases, and the machine has an artificial intelligence on board that is able to recognize the expression of a human interlocutor and respond accordingly. This is really very annoying.

It’s really hard not to think of the movie I, Robot – which is adapted from a short story by Asimov – or of other sci-fi works that eventually make machines known to humans, not always in a peaceful way. Social networks, especially Twitter, have not failed to parallel these networks.

Ameca very well reflects the concept of “super valley” coined in the 1970s, which refers to the fact that when an object reaches a certain degree of anthropomorphic similarity, it causes a feeling of fear and uneasiness. In theory, this will only be addressed when robots are physically indistinguishable from humans. Another favorite hypothesis of science fiction.