‘Chaos specialists’

I only had one doll in my entire childhood. My parents chose her for me when I was about three because they said she had the same name I did, recorded inside her. She was one of those talking dolls that had a "player" at her back and had two little disks, one clear and one yellow green that played sentences and songs, respectively, in three languages: one in Tagalog, one in English and one that I have never been able to figure out up to now, but if you force me to make a wild guess, sounded Romanian. That doll could talk but it could not walk (that was the talent of my younger sister’s doll), but if my doll could walk, it would have swiftly packed its disks and left me in a few days after she was given to me.

On hindsight, I think I specialized in doll cruelty. After I have memorized all her sentences and songs in the few minutes that I had her, I started getting bored with her. So I started to tinker with her. First, with the button in her belly which I pressed to elicit the Romanian songs. That button eventually became lose and lost. I also poked her eyes, wondering what made it blue until one of her eyes came off. I also washed her hair with soap wondering if that blonde color would also wash off. The color did not wash off but all her hair did. I was also frustrated at her inflexibility and accidentally twisted all her limbs out of their joints. In a few days, I was a three-year-old parroting Romanian songs around the house, clumsily clutching a naked, one-eyed, bald, limbless doll with a gaping hole in her tummy. I also always seemed to hold her the wrong way and she always ended up either bumping me on the head (and dolls then I think were made of materials that were molecular cousins to bricks) so that in no time at all, my doll and I both ended up constantly bruised in each other’s company. I never wanted another doll again and my parents, I think, were also legally "requested" by doll companies to not give me one ever again. That is also why my parents sent me to school at three. They ran out of ideas at in-house training.

Fast forward 37 years and here I am reading about the hi-tech versions of my doll in a pre-school in UC San Diego and if the ministry of Robots in South Korea would have its plans all working out as they wished, also soon in every home in South Korea.

In an article by Larry Gallagher in Wired Magazine sometime late last year entitled What Bots can teach tots (and vice versa), he exposed a day in the life of Rubi, a robot put together by the Machine Perception Lab of the University of California San Diego, and Qrio, a humanoid prototype made by Sony.  These two robots are both learning experiments at what it is like to learn in real human settings and what better way to learn for these robots but to interact with what Gallagher called "chaos specialists" a.k.a. pre-school kids! All in all, Rubi tried to teach the very active tots lessons about shapes and some songs that had to do with the wheels of the bus and some song about four monkeys. Rubi was trying as best as it could, with its controllers at the helm, to be a teacher to these tots, trying to take in facial expressions and trying to come up with the most appropriate response to the kids – an area in robotics called "affective computing" since it involves a robotic program that could elicit responses and respond to emotional stimuli like facial expressions. The kids treated Rubi and Qrio much like they would any other classmate. They interacted with them when they felt like it and even hugged Rubi when Rubi started to tick uncontrollably and also put a blanket over Qrio when Qrio "decided" to lie down on the floor and "sleep." At the end of Gallagher’s narrative, the team at UC San Diego was determined to learn as much as they could from the robots’ interaction with the toddlers but also admitted how far they are from the Hollywood-fed notions the public has of robots. For instance, just in the aspect of facial expressions, the team had to develop a program fed by 10,000 facial images to enable the robot to differentiate between a human face and other things in the background. Right there, you will immediately appreciate the cunning of a child’s intelligence when the kids immediately respond to the face of another kid, their teacher or their parents in a meaningful way.

But readers and robotic experts, try going to the BBC website and look for that test on how keenly you can perceive the correct emotion being expressed by specific "looks" as expressed by only a set of eyes you will be asked to look at. I scored perfect in that test but then, so do most women, the test notes say. So robotic guys – right there is your clue – delve into the neuroscience of how females perceive faces and maybe you can evolve a better Rubi.

But UC San Diego may not have to look at Hollywood as the one that sets the standard for the public perception of robots. As it is breaking through the global film industry, Korea seems to be making headway into the future in the state of robotic art and science. Korea wants, at least, the very likes of Rubi, in every Korean home between 2015 and 2020. This is the plan of Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communication, specifically set by its intelligent service robot project. This plan is a product of a program that has put together 30 companies and 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes to make it happen. This was revealed in a New York Times article last April 6 by Normitsu Onishi, "exposing" a country that has 72 percent of its households connected by broadband Internet only in the last five years. By 2007, the article says, Korean robotic experts say that "networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production" (uhm, they may want to come up with back-up plans if children react violently when they are bored with singing robots.) The article also quoted Korean officials, saying robots will soon "guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers." Aside from being excellent engineers, scientists and planners, I also think that if they also want to be an example to the world, the Korean technocrats are such optimists. This is why. My heart goes out to the robot that will one day manage traffic in the rotundas of Rome, streets of Manila or downtown Bangkok. I will pat the back of the robot that will decide who gets which taxi in Manhattan or in Beijing. I will hold the hand of the robot that will be assigned to answer complaints of mobs angry over a failure in public service. I will also give a sympathy card to the robot protestors designed by a Spanish factory called La Fabricadecosasbonitas (The Factory of Pretty Things) featured in Wired online last January. In other words, I will assure those robots that we understand that it is truly a puzzling state that we humans, the species who are "chaos specialists," have created, in every living nook and cranny of our public lives.

I think it was truly hilarious when Rubi, in the middle of dealing with the tots, suddenly developed an uncontrollable robotic version of a nervous tick and then "suddenly she stops, then slowly tilts her head upward until she is staring blankly over the heads of the toddlers and straight up at the exposed I beams supporting the roof of the Early Childhood Education Center." I don’t know about you but head looking up, as if to say it just simply ran out of ideas how to deal with pre-school kids, is for me, the most "human" reaction Rubi has ever expressed so far. I don’t think I, or my talking doll, could have done any better (wherever she is now.)

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