Robot
reflections – are they going to be recognized? So far the answer is no, they
lack the self-awareness. Just like one-year-old humans, the image that they see
in a mirror is apparently somebody else.
To
most of us this may not seem to be a matter of great urgency, but the BBC
reports that to Mr. Hart at Yale this is not a state of affairs that he is
prepared to ignore and is actively programming his wide-eyed robot friend Nico
to look in the mirror and be just as horrified as the rest of us as he sees
what a less than ideal state he’s in (1).
Robots
have already been able to recognize that the actions that it sees in a mirror
are of an entity that it can copy, but so far no robot can wave at a mirror and
record that whatever is waving back is a itself. This self-recognition is not a
trivial problem that could be meaningful solved by having a name-tag which the
robot could read (in mirror writing of course). It is one of recognizing that a
movement is not another robot copying but a reflection of its own motion.
The
concept of recognizing a reflection of oneself is a sophisticated one and
requires a whole series of visual cues, both static and dynamic at the same
time understanding that the right hand is really the left hand.
Not
all animals can pass this “mirror test” of self-awareness. Some primates can
and apparently elephants and dolphins can, although none of these have regular
access to mirrors as part of their daily ablutions.
Once
Nico has learned to be sufficiently self-aware to recognize himself in a
mirror, I wonder how long it will take him to learn to recognize himself in a
photograph where now the right hand is the right hand and there are no
motion cues? Perhaps an acting job in the movies will be a halfway house in his
education.
