Farewell Mars Rover… you heartless unfeeling machine.
Last week, the internet came together in mourning for NASA’s Opportunity: Mars Exploration Rover –B ─ known to his friends as Oppy.
Starting his long journey in March 2003, Oppy was originally meant to last only 90 days but ultimately continued to quietly roam the surface of Mars for the best part of 15 years. By using his solar panels to survive, Oppy’s ongoing existence (along with his three brothers) put us in the pleasing situation of being able to claim that Mars is a planet entirely populated by robots.
Last Wednesday, the reign of the robots came one step closer to its end. With dust having collected on his solar panels, Oppy had grown increasingly weak, ultimately sending his last poignant message back to base…
“My battery is low, and it is getting dark.”
These immortal words ─ shared on Twitter by a NASA science reporter ─ have touched people all around the world, with heartfelt tweets, mournful obituaries and even fan art being shared in memory of Oppy and his lonely trip to Mars.
Of course, Oppy cannot appreciate these messages of love and affection. After all, he is nothing more than a heartless, emotionless, unthinking machine. In fact, he (it) is not Oppy at all, but rather the Mars Exploration Rover –B.
As is so often the case, the myth told is more compelling than the truth. The Mars Rover does not speak, nor does it send or receive written, language-based communication. The Rover’s final message to earth was not “My battery is low, and it is getting dark”, but rather a series of technical data bursts interpreted by NASA to mean that its solar panels are clouded and that the device’s battery has run down as a result.
Taking to twitter, one of the rover scientists (possible with the help of NASA’s PR team) decided to translate this data burst into a memorable, touching ─ if technically untrue ─ sentiment, which will now go down in history as the final words of the Mars Opportunity Rover.
So what does this tell us? Well, first it tells us that NASA is great at PR and really knows what will get people talking. Second, it tells us a lot about the human capability to project our own feelings and emotions onto machines.
We all love the story of Oppy, the plucky little robot dying on Mars. We love to believe that he’s been wandering about up their like WALL-E, sending poignant messages and wondering if he can ever come home. And yet, nothing about the Mars Exploration Rover –B, its mission, or its final data burst, implies any such anthropomorphic qualities. It’s just that we want to believe that it’s just like us.
It’s long been argued by roboticists and AI researchers that technology can never truly be considered ‘intelligent’ until it goes beyond simply reeling off facts and starts acting with real emotions. Still, based on our reaction to Oppy, it may be that such emotive experiences are possible long before the necessary technology exists.
By relying on our own ability to project emotions, robots and AI can leave us to do the vast majority of the emotional heavy lifting. Already we are seeing children ─ and increasingly adults ─ reacting to products such chatbots or Amazon’s Alexa with an increasingly emotive and human tone.
The psychologist Sherry Turkle touched upon this phenomenon back in the early 2000s. She found that when people were faced with a relatively basic robot, they worked extra hard to fill in the gaps. When the robot failed to respond correctly, it was because “he didn’t hear them” or “he didn’t understand”. As Turkle concluded, robots don’t so much “fool” us into thinking that they can understand and relate to us, they simply provide us with the opportunity to fool ourselves.
As roboticists and AI researcher strive for increasingly emotive and lifelike experiences, understanding the impact of this effect is proving an important first step. Just as with Oppy, the little robot dying on Mars, machines don’t need to be perfect to convince us that they’re human. With the right prompts in place, we’re more than happy to convince ourselves.
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