One of the biggest mysteries
of science today is to understand how human
infants develop.
Which is to say, how do an infant’s
skills and capabilities get more and more
complex? Pierre-Yves Oudeyer is trying to
solve this mystery with robots—robots that
are capable of learning about each other and
their surroundings.
That can by themself acquire new
skills and new concepts in an open-ended manner.
Oudeyer’s robots were on display
for the general public in Paris at Fondation
Cartier. And David Lynch is the artist who
designed the robot heads, which convey … well,
let’s have Lynch say what they convey.
Each viewer—they’ll feel
a little personality come through. I think
they would want to be friends with the robots.
The robots can sense the world around
them in three ways.
The first is curiosity-driven learning.
Curiosity-driven learning, whereby
the robots explore how to control and manipulate
objects.
Yeah, yeah, they’re curious little
beings, yeah.
Then the second is imitation.
Imitation of people.
Look at that—they’re watching,
they’re thinking, they’re trying to figure
things out. They seem to be learning something.
And the final mechanism—
Spontaneously inventing a new language.
The robots converge on a set of
words, developing a shared way of describing
the objects in their world.
The results of this work might, one day, help
us design robots capable of interacting with
and learning from us.
And in so doing, they might just teach us
about our own development—our first words,
steps, and thoughts.
