[Spoiler Alert]
If you are in the business of designing robots for the coming, personal robot dominated world, who would you employ? Robotics engineers naturally, AI experts, computer scientists … and of course artists, animators, actors and film makers! Why the latter? Well, they have been designing robots far longer than either robotics engineering or computer science has even existed as a career. What they might add is illustrated (literally) in the animated film ‘The Wild Robot.’
The Wild Robot tells the story of a newly dispatched personal robot, ROZZUM Unit 7134 or “Roz”, that is shipwrecked in a storm on a remote wilderness island. Looking for a task to do to justify its existence, it unexpectedly finds itself having to learn how to be a mother. This is not part of its training. However, it is adaptable. It starts the film very robotic but gradually, as it teaches itself more about its new role, it develops much more human-like emotions. After all a first requirement of any parent is to show love. The film is as much about Roz’s journey learning and reprogramming itself to be emotional as the actual story.
So, suppose you are designing a robot to show human emotions, where would you start…with a programmable mouth probably. After all, happiness, sadness and lots more are all there in the mouth. Then you would want eyes that can change shape, eyebrows, and then, to really get it right, something in place of all those muscles in our faces that give us the ability to show micro-emotions.
So what did the film makers give Roz? Two big circular eyes that are cameras and … nothing much else. No face, no nose, no eyebrows, no muscles to move in the face at all. Just some lines of LEDs that can change colour. And yet, it is very clear throughout the film that Roz is becoming gradually more emotional, and exactly what emotions they are feeling. This was something director Chris Sanders was explicitly after. He wanted something much more than a 2-dimensional robot switching from being robotic to being human-like and that is what the film delivers. It has even been praised by critics for its “emotional depths”.
Emotions of course are not the same as facial expressions. We can understand the emotions of others through expression but through lots of other means too, including gestures (like slumping and arm movements) and tone of voice. It is easy to program a robotic face with mouth and eyes etc to show different expressions but that of course does not mean the robot shows emotions, any more than carving a pumpkin to smile means it is happy! However, humans are easily fooled and naturally attach emotions to things that show expressions we recognize. We also use it to help us understand others, so if robots are to live with us it probably needs to fake emotions somehow (assuming it doesn’t actually feel anything). If a robotics company wants us to feel comfortable around robots, and live with them happily, they need to get this right. As the film shows, that doesn’t just mean making robots that are impossible to distinguish from humans (and that approach has risks as unless you make it really, really accurate you hit what is called the “uncanny valley” where what we see are zombie like monsters rather than pleasant companions).
A lot of Roz’s emotions come from the brilliant voice acting of Lupita Nyong’o, who plays Roz. She gradually changes the way she voices Roz through the film. It isn’t a sudden switch but a gradual change you hardly notice. The artists and animators also put an enormous amount of time into developing Roz too. In the story, Roz, gradually reprograms herself based on her ability to mimic others. In terms of animation, the robot uses more and more human-like gestures but also gradually uses those LEDS more and more to show different emotional states, both in the way they flash and in changing colour between red and blue. That was something the animators improvised , using what they had, rather than the plan from the start. This mirrors ideas in Ian M. Banks Culture novels where robot AIs show emotional states through wide use of coloured lights.
We could move towards a world of everyday, everywhere robots that look robotic and emotion-less, or one where they mimic humans with exact copies of the way humans show emotions, Blade Runner style, but much more interesting would be one where, as with Roz, they are clearly something else: where they have their own language to express emotions, that helps us understand them. As the film-makers have shown, wide emotional range can be shown in many subtle but different ways. Time to recruit some artists, film-makers and actors to your robotics start-up if your robots are going to stand out from the crowd?
Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
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