Greetings Economists, The U.S. military is seeking to give soldiers various kinds of tools to endure the terrors of battle. The following technology review indicates how the U.S. military is approaching the issue of emotion production and what to do with such information. Aside from the normal question about another typical unrealistic technology boon doggle, does emotion production technology have implications for working class structure? thanks, Doyle Saylor
Feeling Blue? This Robot Knows It By Louise Knapp Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56921,00.html 02:00 AM Jan. 01, 2003 PT Science fiction often depicts robots of the future as machines that look like people and feel, or at least hanker after the ability to feel, human emotions. A team at Vanderbilt University is turning this notion on its head by developing a robotic assistant whose goal is not to develop emotions, but rather respond to the moods of its human master. By processing information sent from physiological sensors the human counterpart wears, the Vanderbilt robot can detect when its master is having a bad day and approach with the query: "I sense that you are anxious. Is there anything I can do to help?" But do people really want a machine sensing their anxiety and offering assistance? If that's all the Vanderbilt robot was intended to do, it wouldn't have much shelf life. But the research team has a specific kind of service in mind for its mechanical assistant. Researchers envision the emotion-sensing robot serving military personnel on the battlefield. "The human commander may get into trouble but be unable to ask for help," said Nilanjan Sarkar, team member and assistant professor of Vanderbilt University's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "In cases like these his robot assistant will be able to detect his stress and either communicate the need for assistance or assist in some way itself." The robot's sensors consist of an electrocardiogram to record heartbeat, a skin sensor that can detect tiny changes in sweat production, an electromyography sensor that detects minute muscle activity in the jaw and brow, a blood-volume pressure sensor that measures the constriction on the arteries and a temperature sensor. "The robot uses algorithms to translate the information it gets from the sensors into a format it can understand," Sarkar said. "One of our most important claims is that the robot can process this information in real time." So far tests with the robot have proved promising. The machine responds on cue to signals of distress and approaches its human counterpart to ask if he's OK. The robot's biggest hurdle may not be its design but rather its human counterpart accepting it as a trusted assistant. "Speaking as a former soldier, the last thing I would want is an artificial girlfriend by my side to nag me about how I am feeling while out in the battlefield," said John Petrik, corporate communications officer at the Office of Naval Research. But, Petrik added, as one of the project's sponsors, the ONR believes the research has potential to develop smarter robotic aids for military use. Other robotics researchers agree that the Vanderbilt robot has potential but needs fine-tuning. "Taking these (physiological) signals is certainly a good indication of the human state, but we are at a very primitive stage of understanding the relation between the internal states -- what is observable -- and human emotion," said Takeo Kanade, director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The Vanderbilt team has time to work the kinks out of its robot's emotion-detecting abilities. Sarkar admits that it will be a few more years before the robot makes it onto the battlefield.
