SEAI: Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence Based on Damasio’s Theory of Mind

Abstract

A socially intelligent robot must be capable to extract meaningful information in real time from the social environment and react accordingly with coherent human-like behavior. Moreover, it should be able to internalize this information, to reason on it at a higher level, build its own opinions independently, and then automatically bias the decision-making according to its unique experience. In the last decades, neuroscience research highlighted the link between the evolution of such complex behavior and the evolution of a certain level of consciousness, which cannot leave out of a body that feels emotions as discriminants and prompters. In order to develop cognitive systems for social robotics with greater human-likeliness, we used an "understanding by building" approach to model and implement a well-known theory of mind in the form of an artificial intelligence, and we tested it on a sophisticated robotic platform. The name of the presented system is SEAI (Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence), a cognitive system specifically conceived for social and emotional robots. It is designed as a bio-inspired, highly modular, hybrid system with emotion modeling and high-level reasoning capabilities. It follows the deliberative/reactive paradigm where a knowledge-based expert system is aimed at dealing with the high-level symbolic reasoning, while a more conventional reactive paradigm is deputed to the low-level processing and control. The SEAI system is also enriched by a model that simulates the Damasio's theory of consciousness and the theory of Somatic Markers. After a review of similar bio-inspired cognitive systems, we present the scientific foundations and their computational formalization at the basis of the SEAI framework. Then, a deeper technical description of the architecture is disclosed underlining the numerous parallelisms with the human cognitive system. Finally, the influence of artificial emotions and feelings, and their link with the robot's beliefs and decisions have been tested in a physical humanoid involved in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

The Parasitic Nature of Social AI: Sharing Minds with the Mindless

“…If humans are nothing more than biochemical machines, soon to be explained by advances in neuroscience, machines could have qualitatively similar feelings to us. Metzler et al (2016) and Cominelli et al (2018) discuss the possibilities of robots with emotions. Would such machines be able to form authentic relationships?…”

Sexbots: Customizing Them to Suit Us versus an Ethical Duty to Created Sentient Beings to Minimize Suffering

“…Consciousness may be considered as an emergent property of integrated sets of processes forming the self, as suggested by Prescott [35]. Some of these are already present in existing robots, raising the possibility that consciousness may emerge without necessarily being specifically designed in.…”

“…It makes a significant contribution to robotics scholarship by critically assessing the implications of the near future's holding not only a range of customized non-sentient sex robots, but also a variety of self-aware, sentient sexbots customized to have differing capacities and awareness. The paper's critical inquiry into the ethical and legal constraints which should limit permissible customization deepens the literature on the social consequences of robots, as well as the ongoing debate over robot rights and robot consciousness [32][33][34][35]. Moreover, extrapolating from current theories of consciousness in neurorobotics [34,35] and the expanding use of biomimetic techniques based on mammalian neurobiology to create intimate robot companions [36][37][38], it considers attraction, intimacy, mammalian neurobiology and biomimetics to make the new claim that sexbots are likely to be pioneering examples of conscious robots.…”

The Ghost in the Machine

“…We, however, may argue that this conclusion is premature, Metzler et al (2016) does when they comment on Turkle's position and ends up saying that robots might become authentic companions. The progress on this field is so rapid that it is difficult not to imagine a future where some will argue that robots are shaped by their experiences, and we have already seen that computers are now built with the intimations of emotions (Cominelli 2018). Furthermore, as we have seen, it is also possible to view human beings as little more than machines reacting to external impulses-much the same as robots.…”

“…He concludes that "[m]ost animals with complex brains satisfy these conditions, in all probability" (Damasio 2003, p. 110). Cominelli et al (2018) picks up on Damasio's theory of mind and discusses the possibility of artificial intelligence with social and emotional intelligence. They present a "SEAI (Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence), a cognitive system specifically conceived for social and emotional robots.…”