from the editor of aseidman.com

DARPA Challenge: Predictable Anthropomorphism

Posted by Ariel Seidman | November 11, 2007

This year’s Darpa challenge introduced the autonomous cars (yes— no drivers or human input to navigate the cars) into an urban environment — NY Times has some good coverage here.


Below is the strange yet predictable part of the article — the media always tries to anthropomorphize robots — uhh… last time I checked this is software that operates metal and plastic. Once we do get around to commercializing this stuff, these autonomous cars will have brands much the way an Apple computer has a different kind of brand vs. a Dell computer, but we won’t confuse them with people. Talking about the applications and commercialization of this technology seems like a far more useful conversation to be having.

“Donald A. Norman, a psychologist and an industrial designer, argues in “The Design of Future Things,” his recently published book, that a new organism is emerging that he calls a “person+machine.”

“Machines have neither motives nor emotions,” he wrote recently in an e-mail message. “Still, machines, appliances and even services have personality traits, if only because they were designed to be conscientious or not, friendly or curt, smooth or abrupt, condescending or understanding, recalcitrant or forgiving.”

Autonomous machines of the future, he said, will increasingly have emotions for the same reason that people have them: to protect themselves as well as to make choices among competing demands for their attention as well as a mechanism for social cooperation.

Though the Darpa autonomous vehicles were clearly not “thinking” machines, there was evidence that the line between human and machine consciousness might have just become a bit less clear.

{note to self: never use words with more then two syllable in a title}

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