.if men are appearances created by the Void, then whatever men create must also be created by the Void. It must also partake of the buddha-nature, as do the rocks and trees around us. Specifically, since I myself was created by the Buddha, the machines and robots that I design must also be created by the Buddha (Mori, 1981, 179).
Mori goes on to argue that it is indeed possible to recognize the buddha-nature in a robot and to have some sort of spiritual connection to the machine, one manifestation of the buddha-nature to the other. It is very likely that these cultural values are explicitly or tacitly affecting the design of personal robotics by the Japanese and others in the East. As the philosopher Andrew Feenberg has shown, different societies and communities will produce different, alternative expressions of the dominant technological paradigm (Feenberg, 1995). We should therefore expect to see very different relationships to robotic technology between various cultures. As an article from the Japan Economic Newswire reports:
“For the Japanese, the distinction between ‘me and others’ and ‘man and robots’ has been vague,” said Norihiro Hagita, head of the Intelligence Robotics and Communication Laboratories of Kyoto who is studying the coexistence between man and robots. “This flexible sensitivity has helped produce a culture to share various jobs and experiences with robots” (Japan Economic Newswire, January 2005).
Karl MacDorman, a researcher at the robotics lab in Osaka suggests an alternative hypothesis as to why the Japanese in particular are working so hard to create personal and service robots (MacDorman, 2005). He suggests that since Japanese culture has so many social mores regarding proper interpersonal relations that can be very taxing and difficult to maintain, it is preferable to them to interact with a machine than with a fellow human being, it is impossible to embarrass a robot with a misspoken phrase or improper gesture so it is a less stressful interaction.
Both of these hypotheses are reasonable and it is possible that they are both true since a traditional cultural predisposition towards animism would reinforce the behaviours MacDorman observes. If relationships with other humans are difficult culturally, and one is predisposed to affable feelings towards robots, then it is natural that we will see the friendly behaviors towards robots that MacDorman and others find in Japanese test subjects.
More people are living longer and this is beginning to put a stress on caregivers. This stress is particularly evident in Japan where the population of the older generation outnumbers the younger generations. As a world leader in robotics technology, the Japanese have begun to deploy robots to address the problem (Biever, 2004). The hope is that one day robotic devices will provide help, monitoring, and companionship to those elderly that cannot get these things from their family or other sources.
A number of robots have already been built that attempt to serve several of the needs of this population and a few have even achieved some success. It is informative to review some of the successful robot designs to date.
Paro is a robot baby seal. It has soft white fur and big eyes with a cute little nose, and looks like an unremarkable stuffed animal (Hornyak, 2002). But under the white hygienic fur is a complex array of sensors and actuators that cause Paro to react in interesting and stimulating ways when someone speaks to it or pets its fur. Paro even behaves according to a circadian rhythm mimicking a natural sleep wake cycle. Paro is used for robot therapy, where the robot is brought into nursing homes and groups of the elderly are given the opportunity to interact with it. Typically they cuddle and hold it like a real animal and talk to it like it was a small infant to which the robot responds with gentle movements and sounds. Oddly enough, most of the participants find interacting with the machine compelling, and some of the patients with age related dementia even have a hard time realizing that Paro is just a machine (Japan Economic Newswire, 2005). Faced with the monotony of institutional life, watching television, or interacting with a robot, many of the elderly find the latter choice the most compelling.
Another problem facing the Japanese elderly is that there has been a downturn in the number of children in the country and this fact, along with the death of the extended family, means that many elderly do not interact with children as much as they might like. To address this need, the toy company Tomy, in conjunction with a bedding manufacturer, has created Yumel a small robotic doll. “The Yumel doll, which looks like a baby boy and has a vocabulary of 1,200 phrases, is billed as a “healing partner” for the elderly ...” (Agence France Presse, 2005).71 This doll is not much of a robot since it only moves its eyes and plays pre-recorded phrases without moving its mouth. Even so it has proven popular, which is an interesting phenomenon in itself. One may set Yumel to match the users sleep patterns and the users are supposed to take it to bed with them where they can cuddle with it and it will sing them sweet lullabies. In the morning it wakes its owner up at a preset time. An additional ‘feature’ is that it will occasionally beg you to buy it presents and new clothing, which can be obtained, of course, from Tomy. Just what the ‘healing powers’ of this kind of machine are is hard to tell, but nevertheless it is a popular item.
A similar toy aimed at both adults and the elderly, with children seen only a secondary market, is the doll Primopuel. This doll looks like Pinocchio without the nose and, like Yumel, also has a modest vocabulary and can babble on like a small child. This doll has proven to be very popular and Bandi, its maker, has made millions of Yen from this fad. Owners have reportedly taken to the robot as if it were a real child and it serves as a kind of surrogate for childless couples and other lonely adults (ibid). This growing market for companion robots has not, as yet, spread too far out from Japan but efforts to sell these products are proceeding in Europe and America.
There is also a desire to build robotic companions on the other side of the Pacific. Some of the most interesting work on this subject has come out of the Robotic Life group headed by Cynthia Breazeal in the MIT Media Lab.72 Breazeal was a student of the revolutionary roboticist Rodney Brooks, and she has taken the maverick milieu Brooks brought to the AI lab at MIT and run with it in fascinating new directions. The robots created by this lab so far have garnered a great deal of media attention due to their compelling sociable qualities.
Most famous of these robots is perhaps Kismet a machine built to interact with people that Breazeal worked on for her doctoral dissertation at the MIT AI lab.73 This was the first serious attempt in American academic robotics to build a machine that could interact with humans on a friendly and personal level. Her team gave Kismet some of the affective responses as they believe adding these capabilities to be “...a critical step towards the design of socially intelligent synthetic creatures, which we may ultimately be able to interact with as friends instead of as appliances” (Breazeal, 1999, 25).
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For details on Kismet: (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet. html).