Justine Cassell, MIT Media Lab Embodiment is all the rage:
humanoid agents, robots with eyelashes. It brings back those
glory days of AI when "human-like" was a goal in and of itself.
And yet, the trend is towards smart environments, disappearing
computers, intelligent rooms. These systems are said to allow
people to interact with the room "as they interact with another
person". In this talk I will agree with Harry Potter that one
should "never trust anything that can think for itself, if you
can’t see where it keeps its brain". I’ll argue that humans need
to locate intelligence, and that this issue poses problems for
the disappearing computer. Bodies are the best possible example
of located intelligence, of course, and interacting with another
person is best done when there is another person to interact
with. On this basis of this discussion, I will support the use
of embodiment in certain AI domains and demonstrate with a
series of implemented systems, including some new work on
"shared reality" -- a paradi