Eyal Fried
Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Israel
The Curious Case of Artificial Curiosity:
How Designing Curiosity-Driven Environments will Expedite Human-AI Evolution (and make life more fun in the process...)
Curiosity has long been recognized as a prominent intrinsic motivation for human development, driving learning processes such as language acquisition, sensorimotor advancement and social skills. Recent approaches in AI, HRI and Cognition research feature curiosity-driven constructs in the development of artificial entities such as robots. Moreover, some researchers attribute to artificial curiosity the potential for affecting human evolution, and in that, human-AI co-evolution. The definition of Curiosity as a motivational mechanism to actively explore for the primary objective of gaining information, and Interest as the state of the neither too well-known nor too far beyond the understandable - allows us to build a framework for the design and implementation of shared, data-rich environments in which human and AI entities behave, explore, interact, learn and develop. I argue that designers, curious explorers by nature and training, should take a key role in the generation of these new environments, and thus partake in the emergence of a new type of evolution. Two constitutional principles of Design are exercised in this context: Design methodologies are aimed to utilize (as distinct from reduce) ambiguity in highly complex, ambiguous situations while targeting a desired goal. Simultaneously and to equal importance, designers embed into these situations developmentally-advantageous properties such as empathy, experientialism and sense-of-control. By employing sensorimotor, vision and voice interfaces, combined with artificial curiosity algorithms and appropriated form-factors, designers will design “curiosity-driven co-living environments” that generate the actions, interactions, language, learning constructs and narratives for new form of existence. Particular deployable domains are discussed.
_____
Eyal Fried is a Cognitive Researcher, Interaction Designer, Entrepreneur and Educator.
He is a lecturer and researcher at the Masters in Industrial Design Program in Bezalel, and the founding director of the Design and Technology track.
Eyal's interests and expertise lie in the domains of Human-Machine Interaction (Brain-Machine in particular), Cognitive and Affective Computing, and the impact of design on science and the human condition. Eyal is the co-founder of Bee3ee - a smart reading platform for Dyslexics, Acclair - a Neuro-experience consultancy, OpenInvo - an open innovation platform and involved with several Bio-medical startups as a project leader and consultant. He has researched, lectured, presented and exhibited in several prominent academic institutions, conferences and museums worldwide.
Eyal holds a BA in Psychology and Communication from Haifa University, MA in Interaction Design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and Msc. in Information Sciences from Rutgers University.