Robot will teach how to deal with irate customers.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: We all know that robotics has a long way to go to reach the standards of the terminators but, think of a scenario where a robot pours abuses, like an angry customer to a service representative at the other end of the phone.
It sure is an awkward situation for support staff to placate an angry customer but now, a tech firm in New Zealand, Touchpoint Group, is spending more than 230,000 Euros on a project to build robots that shower abuses, so that the support staffs can be trained beforehand.
The so-called angry robots will not trigger the beginning of the end of the world because though the robots show no remorse in getting aggressive, it won’t even come close to angry robots that we have seen in sci-fi movies.
According to Dr. Stuart Armstrong, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the Oxford Martian School, Oxford University, it is easy to stimulate anger and other emotions in robots. All that Touchpoint is doing is to load the machines’ database with millions of customer interactions and program it in such a way that the robot can mimic and repeat these conversations.
Dr. Stuart Armstrong was quoted by The Telegraph saying “There’s not much variety in human anger. If someone’s angry they’ll just hurl insults at you, there’s not much subtlety of interaction so you don’t have to code anything complicated. Anger is easy to imitate without having to go into depth.”
Touchpoint’s angry robots will only stimulate some of the basic signs of anger and will be nowhere close to real angry humans. Dr Armstrong further explains “Why would we be afraid of a human who’s angry? Well, because they might do something stupid and lash out. Robots are not going to start punching the person at the other end of the phone or spreading angry messages on Twitter. They’re not going to do a whole host of things that you would expect a genuinely angry person to do– unless it had been programmed to do that. And that’s how you can tell that their anger is purely situational. A sign that a robot has feeling is if they act in a way that we would expect a human to do but they weren’t programmed for.”
There is no denying the possibility of robots that could exhibit worst of human behavior in the future. There is theoretical impasse when it comes to distinguishing actual emotions and consciousness, and mimicked emotion and consciousness. Scientist argues that if robots can mimic emotions and consciousness and react with the same emotional responses to similar events, how can we deny calling it unconscious.
According to Dr. Armstrong, emotionless robots can cause more havoc than robots with emotions. He said “If we can create genuine anger as an emotion in robots, everything in our background tells us that this is dangerous and this is not something that should be placed in a position of power.”
He added that perverted brains with evil intentions might one day create a perfect angry robot. He was quoted saying “If you want to cause harm, create a murderous robot but don’t make it angry. If you want to cause harm then creating the thing that signals danger to all humans is exactly what you want to avoid.”
Dr. Armstrong is hopeful that angry robots won’t create threat to humans but, he says it is difficult to predict whether or not artificial intelligence will cause harm to humans in the future.