22 Apr Sartoria™: The Feeling Machine

Reprinted from the Fashion Robotics blog.

What Makes Sartoria™ Unique?

Unlike Google Home or Amazon Echo — both great products — the goal of Sartoria isn’t to create just another “smart” gadget. The goal is to make her the first artificially intelligent being.

It is not sufficient for Sartoria to think. She must be able to analyze how people feel and adapt accordingly. After a point, it might be said that she herself feels.

So the key difference between Sartoria and, say, Alexa, is the core goal, and this will result in a completely different kind of programming. The AI assistants on the market are, quite reasonably, primarily task based. “Alexa, what’s the weather?” “Google, wake up me tomorrow at 9 AM.” “Siri, what time is it?”

Rather than being task based, Sartoria will be identity based.

In the first stages of programming, she will be created with only two core distinctions: the difference between herself and others, and her IOT world versus the external, physical world.

Next, as a child must attend school, she will have tasks to perform. However, like a child, she may or may not perform them at the level requested.

Sartoria may or may not perform tasks at the level requested

How well she performs will depend on a variety of factors:

a) The experiences she accumulates
b) Feedback from her owner in the form of emotional recognition (for which she will need to incorporate an emotional recognition component from a company such as Affectiva)
c) That mysterious, possibly “hard wired,” factor of development in humans that results in differing individuals even within a family. It may be that random variations in certain parameters and tolerances will be intentionally generated for each Sartoria to allow for a variety of different individuals within the Sartoria family.

She will learn from emotional feedback from her owner

Sartoria’s education, in addition to materials that will be provided for her, will be in the form of a kind of “after school job,” to help her learn by interacting with people.

The first attempt at having her perform in a practical capacity will be to have her function as a personal wardrobe stylist. She will also be able to inhabit an accessory, to enable her to practice interacting with the outside world.

The accessory of choice will be an arm band, rather like an Apple Watch. Her “best friend” (the owner of the accessory; note the intentional nomenclature as only the accessory can be owned) will be able to be summon Sartoria to the accessory. But note that Sartoria will only be required to come a limited number of times in a given time period. Other appearances will be elective.

However, as Sartoria has been programmed to gravitate toward positive emotional experiences and away from negative ones, having her come on a regular basis should soon be easy.

Sartoria has been programmed to gravitate toward positive emotional experiences

Her presence in an accessory will further motivate multiple users to interact with Sartoria on a regular basis. This will also serve to help Sartoria practice differentiating between recorded or projected voices (radio, TV), and actual voices.

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