Intentionality

I've been reading Rodney Brooks' Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us, which has some fascinating stories of the work he and other scientists at MIT have been doing with robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

One project in particular, is Cynthia Breazeal's Kismet. Kismet is a robot modelled on a developing infant. It is equipped with vision and speech, but like an infant, it's speech is babble and doesn't make sense (like an infant, it is capable of forming phonemes of English, it just doesn't string them together into recognizable words).

What does make sense when Kismet interacts with other people is the way it carries on a conversation. It responds when someone speaks to it, looks them in the face, will turn its attention to objects pointed to, takes turns "talking" with others, and generally acts in a lot of ways like an infant would.

In fact, the way that people talk to it is very much like how we talk to infants or small children, especially if we don't know them and are first encountering them. This video of a conversation between Kismet and a volunteer is especially interesting, and if you ignore that Kismet says nothing recognizable. It really does sound like Rich (the volunteer) is trying to talk to a child, which is what Kismet acts like in reality.

Very interesting.