Gayatri manikutty: do you see differences in the kind of joint attention area or in empathy then you work with children rather than adults because we see that there are various interactions that need to be designed and when you are working with children what were some of the more critical factors that really made an impression on the child which probably for an adult could be more on the functionality or the purpose rather than you know the interaction itself so I would like to get some of your thoughts on that aspect and also the other thing was that all the robots you showed had the embodiments of the robot the face is actually an actuated face with the eyebrows and with eyes actually moving and things like that so I wanted your thought on whether to go with the actuated face or not?
Speaker: I think go with an actuated face that’s very interesting almost all the robots you seen except for the lawn movers and vacuum cleaners had some form of facial structure and of course for humans that’s very important we have the eyes mouth these are main tools for the interaction so that’s our important natural tool and we are very skilful at using them difference between adults and humans in interaction and you do because in humans in adult we know we are interacting with somebody else that even if it seems that we have a common goal at me maybe that the other individual wants to exploit us want to use us want to fool us so we are aware we have this awareness that this person reliable or should I cooperate or should I not trust the person so we have the kind of second level of mind reading that I am aware that the other person may want to use my options or so on to get the benefit without me gaining anything and children they don’t have the capacity they don’t have understand false belief thoughts they think everybody needs to cooperate.
Devash: when you told about the idea of purpose or the intention feeding into a robot I was thinking you know when we call something of purpose or intention we are basically referring to a higher goal you know for example sweep the floor it would be a small goal when you are thinking about building an entire ice men it’s a larger goal that requires a bigger intention that will require a larger structure a larger organization and work distribution working with multiple people and which comes does to building consciousness into working together which is basically all human qualities but no other species have this quality so my question is there is a lot of research going on how to build a robot which comes close to being a human should the focus rather be on building machines or robots which are best at human interaction you know user friendly machines rather than building robots we should we should be targeting at building user friendly machines because to be honest robots will never be able to replace humans that’s what I feel I might be wrong please correct I think robots can replace humans because they have already done so in routine works I means in lots of industrial work putting together a car is done by welding robots and so on movements and they do them very quick and fast and I don’t have to take breaks I don’t have sleep and what not there have replaced already the boring and may be labourers in industrial works what I was thinking was when I talked about common intentions and so on was more ordinary situation working together in a workshop in a carpentry or in a washing room whatever where you do your things you robot is doing its things but you have to interact and you have to see what the other one is doing of course you may have building something and cooking or constructing a wooden chair or but there are many sub goals and when reading intentions it’s not just having this general goal that is important but you have to break it down to understand that now this person is going to fetch piece of wood to make the log of chair.
Chris: when I was doing some philosophy of mind studies in undergrad and a little bit grad school they always use the touring test as the prime example of how to tell the computer has you know the rudimentary form of consciousness and it was always you know as like the classic experiment and we have come so far since then but then when you were it struck me when you were talking about how we need drop this idea of making a human and how that has so many assumptions that come along with that are actually counterproductive so I am wondering if that makes touring test more irrelevant or if there some better way to test computers or robots so called consciousness?
Speaker: Well the classical touring test is that you have converse with somebody via a computer and if you can’t tell whether the one you are conversing with is a computer or human then the computer process or the computer program passes the Turing test so far chess this has been passed for long time ago playing chess you can’t tell whether well you can tell because the computer is much better than a human being but that’s another but the Turing test presumes that we use language that’s problem but I think you are perfectly right that having that as a test is not a good one I don’t really know how to answer the question you should use instead I mean I mentioned that most robots are boring you don’t want to interact with them for a long so I would say that robot that’s is interesting to interact with would be or maybe better way of formulating a touring test somebody that has not the same response all the time.
