SELEMCA project— CRISP Magazine # 1
Humanising caredroids using creative technological solutions to supplement and replace existing care-services.
At SELEMCA, we think it is better to be taken care of by a loving robot than by a cold nurse; better to be offered a creative solution by a machine than a doctor repeating the same advices all the time; better to make a decision based on knowledge from the entire Internet than from your daughter who knows someone who knows someone who knows nothing; better to be entertained by a conversational agent who never tires of telling the same old story, than to face your children who are fed up with your Alzheimer.
That is why we think that Caredroids should have the following general purpose functionality: they should be capable of showing affection, be smart reasoners, creative problem solvers, and easy-going entertainers. They also need to be trustworthy, otherwise, people will get scared, which is why Caredroids should know about ethics. Finally, Caredroids should understand that you do not regard them as real. Although humans are quick to believe the lies of their fellow humans, they will reject the robot that tells them the truth. Taking all these requirements together suggests that the Caredroids need to be humanised.
We started humanising our systems by translating twelve years of research into how people dealt with virtual others into models of artificial intelligence. Our focus was on those aspects that are believed to distinguish humans from machines: emotion, creativity, morality, a sense of aesthetics and epistemics. We took these models and tested them against real humans in formal lab experiments but also confronted them with people from the field: patients, care professionals, and informal caretakers. All this information was( and continues to be) fed back into the system to further improve its human-like performance. On the one hand, this advances basic theory; on the other, it makes our systems more user-oriented. In doing so, we are now heading for electromechanical companions that can relate to what people believe is good, beautiful, and true, to what moves them
alice will take care of you
Johan Hoorn
and entices their imagination because these machines themselves can have a human-like experience. In our quest to make Caredroids more humane, it is not enough to consider only the input of one or two disciplines. It requires that the concerns and expertise of the various stakeholders are brought together, so that the Caredroid can, for instance, take perspectives and change communication styles. Within the framework of SELEMCA, we also work with occupational role switching. Designers perform social scientific studies, computer scientists study ethics, health researchers worry about creativity, and psychologists have to think up novel interfaces. The role of the classic Industrial Designer changes just like the role of each discipline that enters the SELEMCA project. Instead of thinking about labels and boxes, we think in terms of‘ heat maps’: people may have their domain of expertise but this does not relieve them of the duty to delve into the field of the other. Everybody has a say in everything albeit from their own vantage point. Thus, everybody is a connector as well as a specialist, Industrial Designers included.
To avoid drifting away from the original plan( so called“ scope creep”), we make sure that all our activities are motivated by the theories we study( e. g., creativity and emotion). We singled out a number of factors that are crucial for the user experience of virtual others, for instance, design issues regarding functionality, aesthetic appearance, realism, and use intentions. But of course, Industrial Design encompasses far more than what is necessary to build a Caredroid.
Johan Hoorn— 1965 j. f. hoorn @ vu. nl
. Managing Director / Associate Professor CAMeRA, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Project leader CRISP project SELEMCA
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