Everyone should think twice before writing off the work that my colleagues and I have been doing in the Global Futures Congress (though I am now forbidden to attend the conferences). We have a very clear idea of what is developing in these areas and a reasonably clear idea about what the future holds in these regards over the next decade. Those who are still walking in their sleep and occupying themselves with petty politics will certainly not be ready to deal with the religious and spiritual ramifications. (Archbishop Lazar) ************************************************************** What Happens When Robots Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves?SNIP And this brings us to Ellie, the world’s first robo-shrink. Funded by DARPA and developed by researchers at USC’s Institute for Creative Studies, Ellie is an early iteration computer simulated psychologist, a bit of complicated software designed to identify signals of depression and other mental health problems through an assortment of real-time sensors (she was developed to help treat PTSD in soldiers and hopefully decrease the incredibly high rate of military suicides). At a technological level, Ellie combines a video camera to track facial expressions, a Microsoft Kinect movement sensor to track gestures and jerks, and a microphone to capture inflection and tone. At a psychological level, Ellie evolved from the suspicion that our twitches and twerks and tones reveal much more about our inner state than our words (thus Ellie tracks 60 different “features”—that’s everything from voice pitch to eye gaze to head tilt). As USC psychologist and one of the leads on the project, Albert Rizzo told NPR: [P]eople are in a constant state of impression management. They’ve got their true self and the self that they want to project to the world. And we know that the body displays things that sometimes people try to keep contained.” 6818431732_16c8be42ae_mMore recently, a new study just found that patients are much more willing to open up to a robot shrink than a human shrink. Here’s how Neuroscience News explained it: ”The mere belief that participants were interacting with only a computer made them more open and honest, researchers found, even when the virtual human asked personal questions such as, ‘What’s something you feel guilty about?’ or ‘Tell me about an event, or something that you wish you could erase from your memory.’ In addition, video analysis of the study subjects’ facial expressions showed that they were also more likely to show more intense signs of sadness — perhaps the most vulnerable of expressions — when they thought only pixels were present. The reason for this success is pretty straightforward. Robots don’t judge. Humans do. But this development also tells us a few things about our near future. First, while most people are now aware of the fact that robots are going to steal a ton of jobs in the next 20 years, the jobs that most people think are vulnerable are of the blue-collar variety. Ellie is one reason to disavow yourself of this notion. As a result of this coming replacement, two major issues are soon to arise. The first is economic. There are about 607,000 social workers in America, 93,000 practicing psychologists, and roughly 50,000 psychiatrists. But, well, with Ellie 2.0 in the pipeline, not for long. (It’s also worth noting that these professions generate about $3.5 billion dollars in annual income, which—assuming robo-therapy is much, much cheaper than human-therapy—will also vanish from the economy.) Full article at: singularityhub/2014/07/29/the-uncanniest-valley-what-happens-when-robots-know-us-better-than-we-know-ourselves/
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:38:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015