Sunday, November 30, 2003

It Came From Hollywood is a short, but interesting, piece by John Seabrook in the December 1, 2003 issue of The New Yorker. Seabrook talks about the collaboration between Stan Winston (probably the most important creature of cinematic automata - at least you get that feeling if you regularly read cineFex) and Cynthia Breazeal of the Media Lab. Sour grapes from Marvin Minsky [...] [tingilinde] For a change, I don't think Minsky's complaint is sour grapes. What he is really getting at is that emotions have an evolutionarily-developed function in guiding behavior, and emotional display in communicating potential behavior to others. The emotional display of this robot is fake because it is not wired in the right way to the robot's overall behavior. If the robot displays fear, it is not because it believes it is physical danger. This robot has no sense of danger. If it displays happiness, it's not because it has fulfilled some desire. This robot is not even acting. Acting requires the ability to feel and display true emotions, and the ability to override that link to display emotions that are not actually felt, or at least display emotions that are felt for different reasons — actor-constructed reasons — than those the audience believes are in play. Antonio Damasio has made some progress in identifying the mechanisms and functions of emotion. To put it computationally, emotion assigns value to the contents of mental states, helping direct the search for actions that will bring about high-value states. At the most basic level, high-value states are those that correspond to a body in good working order. Thus, basic emotions must be wired to critical bodily functions. No such wiring exists in this robot. 6:52:59 PM