你想让机器人帮你做家务吗?什么样的工作可以让机器人去做?你会信任一个人来照顾你的孩子或年迈的父母吗?

This week, it’s the first episode in our new series,The Human and the Machine, generously sponsored by theStanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). We’re kicking off the series with this episode called “The Social Lives of Robots.”

With that title, you might wonder if we’re talking about robots hanging out with other robots, going to robot dinner parties, having robot pals, and so on. But that’s not what this episode is about. We’re thinking about how to develop robots that are socially intelligent.

As robots interact more and more with humans and learn how best to assist us, they need to learn how to do things like read social cues, such as figuring out what we’re looking at and what our facial expressions mean. And they need to learn how to behave so that we feel comfortable and not creeped out interacting with them. That means that they need to develop social intelligence.

Computers and AI have incredible data processing abilities. They can do all sorts of things, like calculate pi to 1,000 digits in a fraction of a second, and let you communicate with people all across the globe with a mere click of a button. We use them to do things fast and efficiently that would be slow and cumbersome if we had to do all the work ourselves. So why do we also need them to be social?

But we’re not talking about computers and AI in general—we're talking about robots in particular. And robots have a kind of body, they move around in space. So they need to be able to perceive and navigate different kinds of environments, and they need to be able to figure out how to behave themselves in those different environments. As we are fundamentally social creatures, a robot that is navigating human environments will need some social skills.

Here’s the problem, though. While robots are unlike your laptop in the sense that your laptop isn’t designed to move around and act autonomously, they’re just like laptops in the sense that they share the same kind of intelligence—computational. Their behavior is just as much a result of ones and zeros as your laptop’s. And it’s unclear how to get social intelligence out of computational intelligence.

Our social intelligence doesn’t come from manipulating numbers and computing data. We have natural resonance systems that allow us to have empathy, to perceive meaning in facial expressions, to follow each other’s eye gaze, etc. A newborn baby, with no ability to crunch numbers, still has more social intelligence than a robot. So how do we get one kind of intelligence out of a fundamentally different kind?

Clearly this is a problem for machine learning. Engineers and computer scientists have to develop algorithms that allow robots to model and mimic human behavior, and learn how to keep improving and adjusting their behavior to human needs. This seems like a very challenging problem. And even if socially intelligent robots are developed, they’re going to be very different from us. Whatever “intelligence” they have will be, after all, artificial.

你可能想知道我们是否真的应该这么做。我们已经有机器人做各种各样的任务，比如在手术室或装配线上帮忙。这才是他们真正擅长的。我们真的希望机器人也能成为护士和教师吗?Surely, those jobs should be left to real people!

我理解人们一直担心机器人会夺走人类的工作，但我认为机器人可以成为人类教师和机器人的助手，而不是替代品。以护士的工作为例，这通常需要体力。他们必须帮助人们坐起来或上下床。现在想象一下，护士有机器人助手来帮助搬运重物，同时他们做所有需要人机接触的事情。

Of course, if all the robot is doing is heavy lifting, you might wonder why it needs social intelligence at all. Why not just work on designing robots that are really good at lifting people in and out of bed and forget about trying to develop their social skills?

Helping physically incapacitated people is not like building cars on an assembly line. One car is just like that last, and once the robot knows how to assemble one, they just do the same thing over and over. But people are individuals with different needs and desires. Even if all the robot is doing is helping the patient get in and out of bed, it will still need skills that the robot working in a car factory doesn’t need.

当人类护士在帮助病人坐起来时，病人畏缩了，护士知道这意味着什么，病人感到疼痛或不舒服。如果一个机器人要接管这种工作，它还需要能够告诉病人什么时候不舒服，仅仅通过观察病人的面部表情。它应该能够立即适应病人的需求，就像现实生活中的人类护士一样。

In other words, if robots are going to be interacting with us, assisting us with various tasks, they need to be able to anticipate our needs based on things like body language and facial expression, and that’s why they need at least some social intelligence.

But robots are also being designed to do a lot more than this. The primary function of socially-assistive robots is social interaction with humans, and they are being used in all sorts of interesting ways, likehelping people with autism learn social behavior skills.

为了谈论社交机器人的挑战和潜在的好处，我们本周的嘉宾是来自塔夫茨的计算机科学家伊莱恩·肖特，她实际上致力于设计社交辅助机器人。希望伊莱恩能准确地解释如何从计算机算法中获得社交智能之类的东西!