Transparent Robots

Earlier this week, Paul Marshall—a post-doc at Open University in the UK—gave a talk at Indiana University on the different notions of embodiment in HCI and how they might be useful. Since embodiment is an influential part of my thinking about robots, I found lots to mull over.

Marshall began with Paul Dourish’s attempt to herd embodiment into one theory. In Where the Action Is, Dourish examines three aspects of embodiment [1] (as paraphrased by me):

• Intentionality—the motivating purpose for an action (presumed meaning)
• Coupling—the meaning that is attached to an action
• Intersubjectivity—the meaning that is negotiated between people around an action

I use action instead of object, even though in many instances there is some kind of social artifact that acts as the focal point for the interaction. Meaning, though, isn’t found in the object, but rather in past interactive experiences.

Marshall pointed to a few criticisms that peck at Dourish’s goal of unification. These include: an emphasis of social interaction over emotion; the removal of bodies from embodiment; and, absence of a transition from focus to background as part of the discussion. He also expanded the domain of embodiment to include felt experience, somatics, embodied facilitation, image schemas, and the extended mind. Jumping down that rabbit hole took me deep into Google Scholar, but for now I want to latch on to the most important concept of embodiment: when does the physical distinction go away?

Learning a technology involves something akin to Heidegger’s transition from present-at-hand to ready-to-hand. In other words, when we are first exposed to a technology, we have to focus on the object and think about its function. Over time, those thoughts move into the background as we simply use the tech as an extension of ourselves to do something. The object and its function is embedded in the choice to use it but otherwise is unobstrusive as we use it to act.

This is a key topic for Marshall’s work with tactile vision systems (TVSS), one of the E-Sense projects at Open University. Based on work done in the 1960s by Paul Bach-y-Rita, this experiment attempts to replace vision with vibrations across a matrix, converting electronic vision to touch-sensitivity. When the participants in these studies wear the special belts that push tactile information to a person’s stomach, the result is an ability to “see” objects without use of eyes. For this to happen, there has to be some leap where the participant no longer thinks of the technical contraption and just uses it to sense things in the world.

Running counter to that (perhaps) is the idea that one’s connection with a device is influenced by a personal investment in its construction. In a 2009 study by the CHIMe Lab at Stanford, researchers looked at the effect participation has on one’s affinity to a robot [2]. 56 people were asked to construct little robots that looked like humans or cars. The car robots were preferred overall, but there were also preferences for robots they assembled themselves.

Put these two ideas together, and we have an interesting tension relevant to social robotics. Is there a point when the robot becomes such an extension of the human mind that it becomes transparent in use? Or is effective social robotics built on the idea that transparency is detrimental? Is it a long-developing relationship and witness to growth that allows a person to accept a robot, and are such relationships every transparent?

References:

1. Dourish, P. (2001). Where the action is: The foundations of embodied interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
2. Groom, V., Takayama, L., Ochi, P., and Nass, C. (2009). I am my robot: The Impact of robot-building and robot form on operators. HRI ’09, pp 31-36.