A robot rushes down a busy hospital corridor dodging random foot traffic. With a subtle gesture from a care provider, the robot enters a room and hands over drugs to a waiting bedside nurse.
It may sound like a futuristic scenario, but an engineering professor at the ÀÖÓ¯VI, in collaboration with colleagues in psychology, is working to make it a reality within the next few years.
, with help from and in the Department of Psychology, is programming robots to work side by side with humans in dynamic work environments by responding to cues in body language.
Hashemi is already becoming well known for his work developing an artificial intelligence system for autonomous vehicles, but this time he’s turning to expertise in a branch of experimental psychology called to help robots interact more like humans.
“Humans are not always, or even often, rational beings … and predicting their complex behaviour continues to elude researchers,” says Hayward.
A better understanding of our interactions — gaze and gestures, focused attention, decision-making, language and memory — can help AI researchers predict “what an individual will do or say next,” she says.
Imagine 10 or 20 robots swerving around human workers in a warehouse, moving heavy materials at high speed. One hurdle of current navigation technology is that robots tend to stop in dynamic environments, “because they have no prediction over the human movement or that of other robots,” says Hashemi.
“We’re looking at how humans interact with each other with minimum information exchanged.”
Hashemi and Mathewson have developed headsets with EEG sensors that, when worn by human workers, will feed brain-wave data into their predictive modelling, along with measurements of eye movement and other body language. It’s research that will move robots one step closer to interacting like human beings.
Intertwined from the start
Although the relationship between artificial intelligence and psychology seems like frontier science, it’s one that has existed since the birth of AI. The neural networks first developed by originators of the technology in the 1950s were attempts to replicate the human brain.
Terms like “intelligence” and “deep learning” seem inseparable from our conception of human consciousness, with all of its strengths and potential failings. And as much as AI can help us understand more about human psychology and its disorders, psychology can also inform algorithms in ways that improve their functioning — while giving them the power to be dangerously manipulative.
Research exploring both sides of that equation — tapping our understanding of psychology to improve AI as well as interrogating its ethical, social and cultural implications — is expanding rapidly at the U of A.
In addition to AI’s much-hyped potential for making our lives better, there is also a growing fear that it could exploit psychology in ways that flaunt our attempts at control. That anxiety is reflected in the recent warning of a risk of extinction on par with nuclear war and global pandemics. The letter cites the threat of rampant disinformation, discrimination and impersonation.
Professor , an expert in the burgeoning field of digital humanities, acknowledges AI’s deep roots in psychology, prompting an between our understanding of the human brain and the development of machine learning.
“Ideas about the brain influenced new designs for AI, and then those new designs influenced our understanding of the brain,” he says.
Far beyond replicating or even exceeding the human brain’s computational capacity, todayR