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Lovotics Engineers Love Betwixt Humans And Robots

Lovotics is a nascent field of AI that attempts to engineer love between human beings and robots. It is the creation of AI researcher Hooman Samani of the Social Robotics Lab at the National University of Singapore.


(Lovotics video)

Across 11 research papers, Samani has outlined — and begun to develop — an extremely complex artificial intelligence that simulates psychological and biological systems behind human love. To do this, Samani’s robots are equipped with artificial versions of the human “love” hormones — Oxytocin, Dopamine, Seratonin, and Endorphin — that can increase or decrease, depending on their state of love. On a psychological level, by using MRI scans of human brains to mirror the psychology of love, the robots are also equipped with an artificial intelligence that tracks their “affective state”; their level of affection for their human lover.

These two systems combine to create “human” psychological and hormonal states that allow them to exhibit happiness, contentedness, jealousy, disgust, and more. These states are communicated with R2D2-like bleeps and bloops, movements, vibrations, and the color of a ring of LEDs under the robot. Bright yellow lights and fast, whizzy movements show happiness, while pink lights (obviously?) show love and dark yellow with quaking movements show disgust.

Helen O'Loy, a 1938 short story by Lester del Rey, a household robot is modified to allow it to have emotions. They succeed perhaps too well, and the robot falls in love with the mechanic.

The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic and rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair...

I'd performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues, and some of them had been tricky, but I still felt like a premed student as we opened the front plate of her torso, and began to sever the leads of her "nerves." Dave's mechanical glands were all prepared, complex little bundles of pansistors and wires that heterodyned on the electrical thought impulses and distorted them as adrenalin distorts the reaction of human minds.
(Read more about Helen O'Loy)

In the end, both men fall in love with their creation. I wonder if Hooman Samani has fallen prey to the same temptation?

From ExtremeTech.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/30/2011)

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