Page 29 - Designing Sociable Robots

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10 Chapter 1

and interactive approach to understanding persons where storytelling (to tell autobiographic
stories about oneself and to reconstruct biographic stories about others) is linked to the
empathic, experiential way to relate other persons to oneself.

Being Understood
For a sociable robot to establish and maintain relationships with humans on an individual
basis, the robot must understand people, and people should be able to intuitively understand
the robot as they would others. It is also important for the robot to understand its own self,
so that it can socially reason about itself in relation to others. Hence, in a similar spirit
to the previous section, the same social skills and representations that might be used to
understand others potentially also could be used by a robot understand its own internal states
insocialterms.Thismightcorrespondtopossessingatheory-of-mindcompetencesothatthe
robot can reflect upon its own intents, desires, beliefs, and emotions (Baron-Cohen, 1995).
Such a capacity could be complemented by a story-based ability to construct, maintain,
communicate about, and reflect upon itself and past experiences. As argued by Nelson
(1993), autobiographical memory encodes a person’s life history and plays an important
role in defining the self.
Earlier, the importance of believability in robot design was discussed. Another important
and related aspect is readability. Specifically, the robot’s behavior and manner of expression
(facial expressions, shifts of gaze and posture, gestures, actions, etc.) must be well matched
to how the human observer intuitively interprets the robot’s cues and movements to under-
stand and predict its behavior (e.g., their theory-of-mind and empathy competencies). The
human engaging the robot will tend to anthropomorphize it to make its behavior familiar
and understandable. For this to be an effective strategy for inferring the robot’s “mental
states,” the robot’s outwardly observable behavior must serve as an accurate window to
its underlying computational processes, and these in turn must be well matched to the
person’s social interpretations and expectations. If this match is close enough, the human
can intuitively understand how to interact with the robot appropriately. Thus, readability
supports the human’s social abilities for understanding others. For this reason, Kismet has
been designed to be a readable robot.
More demands are placed on the readability of robots as the social scenarios become
more complex, unconstrained, and/or interactive. For instance, readability is reduced to
believability in the case of passively viewed, non-interactive media such as classical anima-
tion. Here, observable behaviors and expressions must be familiar and understandable to a
human observer, but there is no need for them to have any relation to the character’s internal
states. In this particular case, the behaviors are pre-scripted by animation artists, so there
are no internal states that govern their behavior. In contrast, interactive digital pets (such as
PF Magic’s Petz or Bandai’s Tamagotchi) present a more demanding scenario. People can