How to Grow a Robot: Developing HumanFriendly, Social AI (Mit Press)

How to develop robots that will be more like humans and less like computers, more social than machinelike, and more playful and less programmed.Most robots are not very friendly. They vacuum the rug, mow the lawn, dispose of bombs, even perform surgerybut they arent good conversationalists. Its difficult to make eye contact. If the future promises more humanrobot collaboration in both work and play, wouldnt it be better if the robots were less mechanical and more social? In How to Grow a Robot, Mark Lee explores how robots can be more humanlike, friendly, and engaging.Developments in artificial intelligencenotably Deep Learningare widely seen as the foundation on which our robot future will be built. These advances have already brought us selfdriving cars and chess matchwinning algorithms. But, Lee writes, we need robots that are perceptive, animated, and responsivemore like humans and less like computers, more social than machinelike, and more playful and less programmed. The way to achieve this, he argues, is to grow a robot so that it learns from experiencejust as infants do.After describing whats wrong with artificial intelligence (one key shortcoming: its not embodied), Lee presents a different approach to building humanlike robots: developmental robotics, inspired by developmental psychology and its accounts of early infant behavior. He describes his own experiments with the iCub humanoid robot and its development from newborn helplessness to ability levels equal to a ninemonthold, explaining how the iCub learns from its own experiences. AI robots are designed to know humans as objects; developmental robots will learn empathy. Developmental robots, with an internal model of self, will be better interactive partners with humans. That is the kind of future technology we should work toward.