The age of human-robot interactions has just turned a big corner with preparations being made for the introduction of the first facebot, or robot with its own Facebook page. The idea is coordinated by researchers at IRML, or Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory, part of the College of IT of the United Arab Emirates University. Inspired by Dr Nikolaus Mavridis, with funding granted by Microsoft, the new “Facebot Project” will be a tool used by researchers in order to help humans overcome their reluctance towards robots. The hope is that creating a social network page for a robot will also help humans maintain an ongoing interest in machines.
The first facebot will be modeled after famous 10th century Islamic scholar, Ibn Sina, aka Avicenna, who, in addition to his voluminous writings on a wide range of subjects during Islam’s Golden Age, was a pioneer in many areas of medicine, pharmacology, and neuroscience.
According to a recent BBC report, “While robots that can engage people have been produced before now, research suggests that humans lose interest – at most a few weeks after being introduced – as the behavioural repertoire of the machine is exhausted.”
The robot will be loaded with three software modules that will aid its human interaction. One module will be able to distinguish the faces of humans and the images they place of themselves on Facebook. Another will be a language module which will allow the machine to have real-time conversations and help it to maintain a database of friends and their social relationships based on information in Facebook. The robot will also have a supplementary range finder, touch screen and stereo camera.
According to the International Business Times, “The robot will create a personal entry for itself in Facebook. Upon meeting a human it has not encountered before, it will ask for his/her name, and search for him in Facebook. Upon finding him, the human’s Facebook entries (age, home town, profession) will serve as a starting point for simple dialogs,” according to the IRML site.
The IMRL site points out that creating a Facebook page for a robot has two overriding novel goals: to demonstrate the first robot that has its own social network and that can create social information in an online context, and that “the formation of shared episodic memories within a social web can lead to more meaningful long-term human-robot relationships.” The obvious implications here are that the social network of this first facebot will eventually extend to other robots as well.
There is little question that the future of social networking will be significantly transformed by the robotics revolution. As I reported two months in a blog on human-robot interaction, ongoing researches into this dynamic are yielding fascinating results about the incorporation of robots into society and about how humans will react to the advancement and integration of mechanical intelligences into society. As the first facebot begins to develop its own social web, perhaps we should stop and consider some of the rather startling implications of where this technology will lead us. Some of the fascinating questions that necessarily arise: Will robots have civil rights and certain protections, for example, against cyber-bullying and other forms of defamation? Will robots be expected to follow certain laws of ethics in their own social interactions? Can humans fall in love and develop relationships with robots? These are all viable and interesting questions that are certain to emerge in the age of Robotics 2.0. As humans and humanoids interact in new and formidable ways, it is certain that such relations will transform the way that we conceive of our own existence—while ultimately teaching us more about what it means to be human.
Tags: Facebook, future of robotics, human robot interaction, humanoid robotics, Ibn Sina, roboethics, social robots
Read about this in the newspaper a few days ago, fascinating ain’t it?