There is a tendency of the human species to analyze to the finest level of detail. Just watch a golf game on TV and you will see numerous replays of the professional’s golf swing with the identification of and commentary on each nuance. No doubt this tendency is a result of evolution; our forefathers that correctly assessed a situation were more likely to survive it (golf swings excluded).
So it was with interest I read the article Emotion robots learn from people on BBC.COM:
“The human emotional world is very complex but we respond to simple cues, things we don’t notice or we don’t pay attention to, such as how someone moves,” said Dr Canamero, who is based at the University of Hertfordshire.
It made me wonder where this would lead. First, an enumeration of the cues. Then an assessment of these cues in terms of their meaning. Some refinement of that interpretation to include context. Followed by the specification of appropriate responses to those context-sensitive meanings, then programming of the robots, some lab testing, further refinement of the algorithms, leading to productization resulting in a broader set of data and more refinement leading to another product cycle. And then what will be hailed Robot 2.0.
Is that the end? No. Then will come the HBR articles and management books enumerating all the cues and appropriate responses. These will, of course, be based on studies of the employees of various leading companies and demonstrate without doubt the benefits. Then will come the round of courses on how to identify these in our employees so we can better understand and respond; to improve our annual employee satisfaction assessments.
The processing of cues will have emerged from our subconscious to frontal-lob processing enabling one to apply formal training to generate tuned and consistent responses to each cue.
How did we get this far 🙂
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