Grieving Robots

There are two things in life that are certain: one day we are born and another day we die.

One's loss can have a huge impact on our lifes. The feeling that is being experienced is called grief, which is the response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or some living thing that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although grief is most associated with death, individuals also grieve in connection with a variety of losses, for example with a break-up. Besides the emotional response to loss, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual and philosophical dimensions.

Next to grief, 'mourning' is also a concept related to death. While grief represents the thoughts and feelings experienced following a loss, mourning includes outward expressions or signs of grieving. The difference between the two is that grief is universal, while mourning is more culturally, regionally or religion-dependent. For example, it is custom in a lot of European countries to wear black to one's funeral, which is in contrast with China, where white is associated with death.

Since grieving of any form of loss is a very complex and difficult emotion, I want to understand it better by exploring it in artificial creatures. A lot can be found on griefbots, a passed one in form of a chatrobot who can be talked to. However this might be a new way of mourning in the future, I am quite skeptical about it. I don't think keeping a person 'alive' in the form of a robot is going to help you to cope with loss. What I do think is that robots can help us with understanding this emotion better. So, I am interested in how robots themselves grief and mourn, when they have lost a loved one. Since it was very hard to find examples, I mainly found examples of movies and games. Below I will show you these examples on artificial creatures that are experiencing grief in any form of loss.

Wall-E

The infamous Pixar/Disney movie Wall-E is about a solitary, waste-collecting robot named Wall-E, who cleans up the garbage of the deserted earth. Wall-E encounters this robot called Eve, with whom he falls in love with. In the scene presented on the right, Eve has arrived back on earth. She repairs Wall-E, but he doesn't recognise hear anymore. His memory and personality appear to be gone. Eve is heartbroken over this as can be seen by her posture, position of the eyes and expression of distress.

Her

The movie Her is about a man, Theodore, who develops a relationship with his AI virtual assistant named Samantha. One day Samantha tells Theodore that the AIs are leaving, to a special beyond the physical world. In the scene on the left, you can see how both characters respond to this emotional experience. Since this AI only exists in voice, it is interesting to see that by language a big part of your individuality and personality is expressed.

The Sims

The Sims, you probably know it already, is a life simulation game, where the player creates a 'sim' whose life is controlled and steered by the player. Just as in real life, sims can develop relationships with each other, either on a romantic or friendly basis. Sims have their own language, Simlish. However, most words do not have a official meaning. As a loved one has passed away, sims also experience grief. In the example on the right, it is shown how a sim called Nipples goes through a certain mourning period of his lost mother. I have no idea about how these sims are programmed, but I think it is interesting to see all little grieving and mourning elements in the Sims. Sims are very expressive in their feelings; their facial expressions, body language, mood bar and small utterances (e.g. grunting, sighing etc.), which all are affected by the loss. When a sims dies, it is directly being turned into an urn. When one clicks on the urn, it has many options such as to mourn, to to engrave epitath and release spirit to netherworld. 'Mourn' in this context means that the sim, in this case Nipples, start crying in front of the urn. Interesting to see is that after this, the sim is feeling better than before. In this way, the Sims teaches us humans something about the way loss affects us and how we should cope with it in order to feel better.

Although these examples above show some form of grief or mourning, they are all simulations of AIs instead of physical representations. I would like to create a pair of robots that form in any way an attachment with each other. One is programmed to cease to exist at a certain point, while the other stays 'alive'. Another option would be to create a robot which can mirror certain emotional, physiological and physical cues of a grieving human. Because I think by holding up a mirror can teach you a lot about understanding yourself and your emotions, which can help you in the process of grieving and mourning.

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