Tank is one of the first of his kind—a fully automated robotic receptionist designed to help visitors find their way around Carnegie Mellon’s computer science school, one of the most competitive in America. He also showcases exactly why sleep deprivation is as common as Ramen around these parts. No longer do programming geeks sit in lonely gray cubicles pecking away at screens glowing with lines of cryptic code. Instead, they pull all-nighters with iPhone-toting designers and starving playwrights, who make sure that every part of their work—not just the nuts and bolts—gets the proper oversight. But Tank is no C-3PO. He looks more like a slapped-together collection of clearance parts from RadioShack than something you might see on the cover of Popular Science. Three years ago, he replaced an older-but-sassier model named Valerie. This Carnegie Mellon roboceptionist aspired to be a lounge singer and professed her love for Barbra Streisand between requests for directions to the nearest men’s room.

The students and faculty had fun playing up the realism of the bots—even going so far as to create personal online bios for Tank and Valerie. That’s what you might expect from some of the world’s leading computer sciences. Robotics is all about making machines more human, right?

Not necessarily. While Tank and Valerie make a great experiment in human-machine interaction, the real cutting edge in technology has more to do with understanding the humanity of the user.

In science fiction (and now even Pixar flicks like WALL-E), dystopian visions of the future depict a world where technology has numbed the human race into Slurpee-sipping submission—a fully automated life of button-pushing, will-sapping convenience. New technology inverts that idea. It seeks not only to make our lives easier, but to learn from us, adapt to our lives, fill our emotional needs, compensate for our handicaps, and ultimately, make us better people. It sees technology that enhances, not replaces. Some people call it “human-computer interaction.” Others call it “celebratory technology.” Our grandparents call it something we can’t print, but they too will come around and join the rest of us in calling it only one thing: kind.

Here you will meet some of the principal characters in the movement behind Kind Technology—people like Jodi Forlizzi, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who developed a new product called the Hug. About the size of an overstuffed pillow, the Hug uses wireless technology to enable physical interaction despite physical distance. Squeeze the Hug on your end, and it will record the motion and send a signal to somebody else’s Hug. When your counterpart holds the pillow to her chest, it electronically mimics your embrace. While sexy androids might seem cool, the Hug serves a more practical—and noble—ambition.

We have seen the future, and it’s cuddly.

THE MOST compelling research going on at Carnegie Mellon does not involve tricking you into conversing with a series of scripts and algorithms. In fact, the school bypasses what once was the Holy Grail of computing: passing the Turing Test.

If you were to credit one person with the invention of the modern computer, you would have to put Alan Turing at the top of the list. This brilliant British mathematician helped crack Germany’s famous Enigma cipher machine during World War II. In 1950, he came up with a proposal for a simple but controversial test to determine whether a machine could “think.” Similar to a popular party pastime called the “imitation game,” an interrogator in a separate room tries to decide, of two other players, which one is human and which one is not through answers to written questions. If the machine fools the interrogator, Turing would call it intelligent. By the year 2000, he predicted, “one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” Turing believed that computers would be so well programmed in the future that the interrogator would have less than a 70 percent chance of making the correct choice after five minutes. But the Turing Test begs the question: Why should we want to? Would you rather have a murderous HAL 9000 on your spaceship, or an iPhone? The Carnegie Mellon team’s essential goal is not to make machinery more human but to make us more humane.

Nursebot Pearl, a robot nurse created at Carnegie Mellon University, longs for a hospital job.

For too long, technological innovation has approached the problems of everyday life with a one-dimensional attitude. It takes the things we hate doing and minimizes or eliminates the effort needed to get them done. But for all that we have gained in convenience from our seemingly endless supply of gizmos and gadgets, we have sacrificed in a broader sense of fulfillment. Not just the refreshing, emboldening feeling of a job well done, but something deeper that cuts to the core of what it means—or at least what it feels like—to be human. The next wave in technology will help us restore that feeling with machines that work with us, not instead of us.

The idea is not entirely new. Even instant cake mixes in post–WWII America employed the philosophy. The very first ones needed no eggs. Just add water and shove the concoction into an oven. But researchers for General Mills discovered that household cooks missed the satisfaction of making something for their families. They wanted the convenience, but they also wanted baking a cake to feel more like baking. The answer: Require the addition of eggs. That allowed the cake mixes to make the cook feel helped, not replaced. (Though others have suggested that women preferred add-egg mixes because the cakes tasted better.) But while this “helper” mentality is not new, human enhancement has only recently become the dominant philosophy of computer scientists, software developers, and robotics experts—not just at Carnegie Mellon but also across the country.
It’s a trend that attempts to change our lives for the better.

Kind Technology assumes that we’re all at least a little bit selfish. Using artificial intelligence, it learns our specific routines and habits (Do you always watch Lost episodes before you go to work?), our unique likes and dislikes (Should your TV automatically record anything hosted by Conan O’Brien?), our personal tics and neurosis (Only want crushed ice with your Diet Coke?). Then it uses that information to custom-design our everyday lives, filters out the unwanted parts, but leaves intact the otherwise mundane experiences that we may not want to forfeit completely.

Kind Technology combines computer science with several other disciplines—everything from design to behavioral sciences—to build technology that better intuits our needs. Several institutions, including Stanford and the University of Maryland, offer advanced degree programs in the field. Major corporations including IBM and Microsoft have founded entire research arms devoted to human-computer interaction. In 1994, Carnegie Mellon became the first college to found a Human-Computer Interaction Institute and started the first Ph.D program in the concentration. Its students will go on to create the Kind Tech gadgets we’ll enjoy in the future.

The demands we place on the next generation of technology will require the coordination of many different disciplines. And in these halls, only a few footsteps from the square-jawed, digitized receptionist who is busy looking up the location of my first interview, that conversation has just begun.

WHEN AARON STEINFELD pulls up a presentation on Reflective Agents With Distributed Adaptive Reasoning—aka RADAR—an ongoing project based at Carnegie Mellon and involving several other institutions, I think of Pam Beesley, the attractive receptionist from the hit sitcom The Office who spends a lot of time trying to cover for her boss’s Clouseau-like lapses in judgment. Basically, RADAR aspires to be the perfect receptionist, even if it will never look as good as Jenna Fischer. Instead, it’s software that starts learning about you the moment you first push the mouse.

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