A Robot That Talks to Itself Might Be Easier to Interact With
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2021
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about interacting with robots that talk to themselves; “mad honey,” a rare, dangerous hallucinogen; and “alief.”
Robots that talk to themselves might be easier to interact with by Grant Currin
- Pepper the humanoid and programmable robot | SoftBank Robotics. (2021). Softbankrobotics.com. https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/pepper
- Pipitone, A., & Chella, A. (2021). What robots want? Hearing the inner voice of a robot. IScience, 102371. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2021.102371
- Pepper the robot talks to itself to improve its interactions with people. (2021). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210421124654.htm
"Mad honey" is a weird, rare, dangerous hallucinogen used as medicine around the Black Sea by Steffie Drucker
- Johnson, S. (2021, April 23). “Mad honey”: The rare hallucinogen from the mountains of Nepal. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/mad-honey
- The Hallucinogenic Honey of Nepal and Turkey. (2017, November 12). Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/mad-honey-red-hallucinogen
- Hess, P. (2017, July 17). Mad Honey: What to know before eating hallucinogenic honey from Nepal. Inverse; Inverse. https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/33974-mad-honey-nepal-rhododendron-grayanotoxin-hallucinogenic
- Jansen, S. A., Kleerekooper, I., Hofman, Z. L. M., Kappen, I. F. P. M., Stary-Weinzinger, A., & van der Heyden, M. A. G. (2012). Grayanotoxin Poisoning: “Mad Honey Disease” and Beyond. Cardiovascular Toxicology, 12(3), 208–215. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12012-012-9162-2
Alief Is When You Act In Opposition To Your True Beliefs by Ashley Hamer
- Gendler, T. S. (2008). Alief in action (and reaction). Mind & Language, 23(5), 552-585. http://www.errol-lord.com/uploads/1/8/6/6/18669048/gendler-aliefinaction.pdf
- Bloom, P. (2010, May 30). The Pleasures of Imagination. The Chronicle of Higher Education; The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-pleasures-of-imagination/
- Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., Moll, J., Hermsen, S., & Russin, A. (2000). Just say no (to stereotyping): effects of training in the negation of stereotypic associations on stereotype activation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 78(5), 871. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sander-Hermsen-2/publication/12497209_Just_Say_No_to_Stereotyping_Effects_of_Training_in_the_Negation_of_Stereotypic_Associations_on_Stereotype_Activation/links/5602972108ae849b3c0e11f1/Just-Say-No-to-Stereotyping-Effects-of-Training-in-the-Negation-of-Stereotypic-Associations-on-Stereotype-Activation.pdf
- Blair, I. V. (2002). The Malleability of Automatic Stereotypes and Prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6(3), 242–261. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0603_8
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:04.8 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about why |
| 0:09.0 | robots that talk to themselves might be easier to interact with. A weird, rare, dangerous hallucinogen known as mad honey, and why you sometimes |
| 0:18.0 | react to things in a way that's in opposition to your true beliefs. |
| 0:21.6 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:24.0 | Virtual assistance like Siri and Alexa can be helpful. |
| 0:28.0 | But they can also be really, really frustrating when they do things that don't make any sense. |
| 0:34.0 | Researchers in Italy have come up with a solution. |
| 0:37.0 | It's not a smarter robot. |
| 0:39.0 | It's a robot that thinks out loud. |
| 0:41.0 | It, by the way, is named Pepper. You might have seen Pepper before, maybe as a |
| 0:46.9 | greeter or a robot assistant at a fancy storefront. It's this friendly-looking |
| 0:51.6 | humanoid robot with big eyes and a tiny mouth like an |
| 0:54.7 | anime character and a slender all-white body. It also has an open source |
| 1:00.0 | platform which makes it handy for research like this. |
| 1:03.0 | What's different about this version of Pepper's programming is that the robot speaks a sort of inner monologue |
| 1:09.6 | while it's trying to figure out what to do. In one experiment, researchers had Pepper work with a human to set a table. |
| 1:16.8 | Pepper was taught where everything was supposed to go and it knew that the napkin was supposed to go on the plate. |
| 1:23.0 | But in the experiment, its human companion |
| 1:25.6 | told the robot to put the napkin on the table instead. |
| 1:29.5 | That's a big conundrum for a robot. |
| 1:31.8 | Pepper responded by talking through the program out loud. |
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