Affective computing is about interfacing with computers on an emotional level. I expect this technology will become ubiquitous, and facilitate communication with our electronic assistants in almost every part of our lives. This technology also carries risks -- of influencing humans on a emotional level below their conscious awareness.

The scientists and engineers spearheading the creation of artificial beings and bionic people are responding to the magnetism of the technological imperative, the pull of a scientific problem as challenging as any imaginable.

Fascinating scientific puzzle though it is, the creation of artificial beings is also expected to meet important needs for society and individuals. Industrial robots are already widely used in factories and on assembly lines. Robots for hazardous duty, from dealing with terrorist threats to exploring hostile environments, including distant planets, are in place or on the drawing boards. Such duty could include military postings because there is a longstanding interest in self-guided battlefield mechanisms that reduce the exposure of human soldiers, and in artificially enhanced soldiers with increased combat effectiveness. (For this reason, the Department of Defense, largely through its research arm — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is the main U.S. funding source for research in artificial creatures.) Artificial creatures can also be used in less hostile environments: homes, classrooms, and hospitals and rest homes, serving as all-purpose household servants, helping to teach, and caring for the ill or elderly.

Among these possibilities, the connection between artificial creatures and human implants might be the most important because it promises enormous medical benefits. This connection might be the single greatest motivation to develop artificial beings. Yet regardless of their potential good uses, and apart from any issues of blasphemy, we have concerns about robots and androids. One fear is that the limitations we think to design out of our creations, from cosmetic deficiencies to the existential realities of illness and death, are essential human attributes, and that to abandon them is somehow to abandon our humanity. Something in us, it seems, fears perfection, and artificial beings threaten us with an unwelcome perfection, expressed as rigid unfeeling precision.

There is another menace first conveyed nearly 200 years ago in “Frankenstein,” and now more compelling than ever: the fear that technology will grow out of control and diminish humanity for all of us. That concern is hardly limited to artificial creatures. It appears in many arenas — the loss of privacy associated with new forms of surveillance and data manipulation; the depersonalization of human relationships; the incidence of human-made ecological disaster; the growing gap between the world’s technological “haves” and “have-nots.” It is especially and deeply unsettling, however, to contemplate the literal displacement of humanity by beings made in the human image, only better.

NEWTON, Mass., May 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoesis Studios announced today it has appointed David Blohm to its Board of Directors and Professor John D. Mayer, Professor Pattie Maes and Kevin Mowrer to the company's Strategic Advisory Board.

According to Ellen Bossert, chief executive officer, Zoesis, "These visionaries will ensure that Zoesis is synonymous with meaningful, enriching, educational products that appeal to parents and children alike. Their talent will further support the company's mission of bringing seemingly alive, emotional digital characters to children on a broad basis."

Sure, they're only machines. But the more they interact with us humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes.

Is your Roomba a boy or a girl?

The Roomba, of course, is that clever little house-cleaning robot. I reviewed Roomba in October 2002, then bought my own a few months later. Since then it’s been happily sweeping my living room and dining room every week or so. It also terrifies my cats and my three-year-old twin boys. All well and good—but what’s the Roomba’s gender?

“It’s a girl,” says my wife. “It’s round. It’s close to the floor. It ends with an ‘a’. I always think of it as a ‘wom-ba.’”

But if the Roomba is a girl, then Asimo is definitely a boy. Developed by Honda Motor, Asimo is a humanoid robot that walks around like a short astronaut in a white space suit. Four-foot tall Asimo is the latest in a long line of the company’s bipedal robots. These days Asimo spends his time as Honda’s goodwill ambassador to the world’s science museums, auto shows, and other venues. Last month he was spotted in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Asimo doesn’t look especially boy-like—there’s no slingshot in his back pocket, there’s no telltale bulge under his belt, and there’s no hint of facial hair. In fact, you can’t even see his face: the robot’s head is covered with a visor that has just two big holes for its video-camera eyes. But Honda repeatedly refers to the robot with the pronoun “he” on the Asimo website.

Indeed, Honda has taken great pains to make its walking robots more lifelike, and part of that realism appears to include giving the robot a friendly sounding name (the previous generation was called simply “P3”). The company’s earliest attempts at walkers were really nothing more than a pair of legs and feet with a big box on top of them. But over the years the robot forms have become decidedly more human—and more male.

Whether or not you think that gender belongs in our mechanical creations has a lot to do with your vision of how these creatures will fit into our future. It certainly takes more effort to make a robot that’s gendered than one that’s asexual. But engineers just want to have fun. Building gender into robots might be a way for the robots’ designers to express their own playfulness and creativity.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll discover another reason why gender might be a good thing for our robot servants: gender will make robots more compatible with their human masters.

You have spent the last 20 minutes talking to an automated call centre. A passionless, computerised voice drones out assurances and urges you to press yet another key. Your blood pressure soars. Finally you hurl your phone at the wall.

Or your teenage son becomes immersed, with increasing agitation, in a computer game. As his temper worsens, his performance declines until he ends up trashing the console in a fit of adolescent rage.

Computer angst - now a universal feature of modern life - is an expensive business. But the days of the unfeeling, infuriating machine will soon be over. Thanks to break throughs in AI (artificial intelligence), psychology, electronics and other research fields, scientists are now creating computers and robots that can detect, and respond to, users' feelings. The discoveries are being channelled by Humaine, a £6 million programme that has just been launched by the EU to give Europe a lead in emotional computing.

The first time you enter a room, you probably look around quite a bit to see what's there. The second time you enter the room, you'll probably look around a little less.

Researchers from Trinity College in Ireland have added memory to a neurobiological model of visual attention in order to generate more realistic animation for virtual reality characters.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

Wired has recently run an article on "affective computing" (which, please note, is not even remotely related to FAI) about detecting and simulating emotions. The article is about a chatbot named Laura, designed to encourage its user to stick to an exercise program.

http://wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/love.html

One particular quote in this article interests me, because I've been expecting it, but not so early:

Everybody should have someone like Laura in their lives. I find myself looking forward to our time together. She asks me which movies I've seen, what my favorite cuisine is, and about the weather "out there." I tell her it's terrific. She responds: "It's always the same in here. Day in, day out."

You know how sometimes people look back in history, and point to some small thing like, oh, say, the early Mosaic web browser, and go on about the unpredictability of the future and how nobody at the time could possibly have recognized the coming impact from such a small hint?

Wired article on MIT's affective computing project.

Prosody

Computers will really understand what you say when they know how you feel when you say it.

Sometimes it's not what you say, but how you say it. That's a truism most people can relate to--but computers can't. While speech recognition software has gotten quite good at understanding words, it still can't discern punctuation like periods and commas, or choose between ambiguous sentences whose meanings depend on the speaker's emotion. That's because such software still can't make sense of the