Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings. — Ray Kurzweil

We are careening toward the robot singularity, when robots will be as much a part of everyday life as computers now are, but we aren’t quite there yet. True, many of us may have toy robots for our own amusement or to entertain our children, sexbots have a strange allure, and we may even have a robot vacuum cleaner disking around our house, but few people really have robots as a part of their daily routine. Yes, we are already cyborgs when it comes to our smartphones and medical devices (at least), and we may be using personal assistants more and more, but robots are still only an integral part of day-to-day function mainly in industrial, military and medical applications. As with , augmented and virtual reality, and self-driving vehicles, robots are several years down the road, both because of the need for advances in technology and out of safety concerns, and also because we may not quite be ready for relationships with machines that mimic human beings both cognitively and behaviorally.

A lot of robot development is directed toward machine and communication, including creating relatable robots which can evoke feelings in us as we interact with them, an essential component for commercialization and of robots into the fabric of our daily lives. Examples of robots which convey emotion include ERWIN (Emotional Robot With Intelligent Network) from the School of Computer Science at the University of Lincoln, in the UK, which doesn’t look human at all but moves parts of its face to convey five emotions by moving its eyebrows and mouth; the more human-looking Sophia, developed by Hanson Robotics, which has the appearance of a human woman; and robots fashioned to resemble specific people, to serve as local communication kiosks for their geographically distant operators, known as “Geminoids,” from Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories.

The challenge of designing robots to best integrate into human social interactions is fertile ground. Areas of interest range from natural language and , to creating robot skin with the texture and abilities of human flesh, to understanding how human beings may respond to robots as if they were people, under the right circumstances. Going beyond usability and simulation, robot and AI research is focusing on human-robot interaction.

Touch me on my shoulder

One interesting question is whether, when it comes to touch, human beings respond to anthropomorphic robots as we do to each other. In order to investigate this question, Jamy Li of the University of Twente, Netherlands, and Wendy Ju and Byron Reeves of Stanford University designed a study to see whether people would show signs of physiologic arousal when touching a robot with the basic blueprint of a human body. They recruited 31 undergraduates (16 women and 15 men), and told them they would be engaging in an experimental anatomy lesson using a robot model. The real purpose of the study was to see whether skin conductance ("electrodermal response," a standard measure of physiological arousal related to how electricity flows through skin differently under ) would change depending on whether participants touched “high accessibility” or “low accessibility” body areas. With other people, we are more comfortable touching high accessibility areas, such as the hands, arms and head, and more uncomfortable touching low accessibility areas, such as the legs (the higher up, the less accessible, of course), midriff and genital zone.

Source: Softbank Robotics

Each participant wore a skin conductance sensor on the non-dominant hand, and participated in 26 trials involving either actually touching or just pointing to a named body area, as instructed by the robot itself, using a robot called NAO (which has a basic human body shape and is only a couple of feet tall, lacking specific anatomic details beyond facial features). Researchers parsed body areas into categories of high, medium and low accessibility based on how often they are touched during routine interpersonal communication (Jourard, 1966). For example, people are much more likely to touch another’s arm while speaking or pat them on the shoulder than they are to touch the upper leg or lower back, and are more likely to touch the outer thigh than the inner thigh.

After the researchers left the room, NAO would say:

“Hello! In this exercise we’ll be talking about vocabulary for parts of the body. Sometimes I’ll ask you to touch my body and sometimes I’ll ask you to point to my body. When I ask you to touch me, please touch me with your dominant hand. When I ask you to point at me, please point at me." The robot would then randomly go through different areas, for each saying something like "Please point to my arm" or "Touch my arm," then explain what that body part was, and then move their body to make it easy to touch or point to that part.

The results of the study showed that people reacted to the robot as if they were touching another person. When they touched a lower-accessibility area, their skin conductivity changed to reflect higher levels of arousal, an effect which was not observed when they pointed to the same body regions. This effect was statistically significant, and affected the majority of the participants. Furthermore, researchers looked at the amount of time it took participants to respond to the robot’s instructions to touch or point to different parts of its body, and found that reaction time was significantly longer when touching lower-accessibility body parts.

The study authors concluded that:

“People are not inherently built to differentiate between technology and humans when enacting social habits. Consequently, primitive responses in human physiology to cues like movement, language, and social intent can be elicited by robots and other media just as they would by real people… [P]eople’s primitive responses can also manifest when socialized rules about body accessibility are violated, even though the robot is just a technological device governed by a computer algorithm. This result suggests that—at least from the perspective of the people doing the touching—humanoid bodies elicit social rules around touching even if the body does not belong to a human being.”

What's next?

The finding that the majority of people experience an involuntary physiological reaction of heightened arousal when touching a humanoid robot is an important one. Beyond designing robots that can mimic human behavior and sensory abilities, robots can also be designed with the understanding that we will respond to them as if they were actually human beings. Our own reactions can enable us to project human feelings onto robots and respond to them as if they were alive. If people can feel presumably some level of bashfulness, perhaps even erotic feelings, when touching a crude simulacrum of the human form, imagine what the implications are for anatomically detailed robots which look a great deal like human beings—as objects of sexual desire, as salespeople, as authority figures, and so on. Neurologically, we may be "wired" to feel the same sorts of things with any humanoid form as we would with a person.

Regardless, robots can be designed to capitalize on human responsiveness with the understanding that we have little control over our reactions, even when we are aware of what is happening. Future research will help to clarify to what extent this arousal effect carries over when touching robots under different conditions. For example, it would be interesting to ask participants how they felt when touching different parts of the robot.

Do people feel embarrassed because they are violating taboos? Do they experience discomfort and want to withdraw, or is part of the reaction eroticized, as it can be with other inanimate objects (and certainly is with robots designed for )? From a sociocultural and evolutionary perspective, what does it mean to become physiologically activated when a robot asks us to touch different parts of its body, especially private parts? Does it shift what it means to be human? And what are the implications for consumers, wary of how psychology may be manipulated to create products which are more and more irresistible? Will robots replace human beings as relationship partners?

On the less apocalyptic side, robots offer tremendous potential for enhancing our lives, affording greater time for leisure activities and intellectual pursuit by freeing up time we would otherwise spend doing things we don't necessarily want to be doing. Robots may provide needed companionship for people uncomfortable with human beings, and robots can help people with physical and cognitive impairment, allowing them to live richer, fuller and safer lives. These include robots for people with , such as PARO, which has been shown to have benefits for patients and caregivers (and which may reduce medical costs), a pressing concern with an aging population. As AI and robot technology converge, we will confront these questions more and more directly.