Sentientia expands on the impact of technological advancement on human emotions and social interactions. The project is the result of a research conducted at the International Center for Research and Education in Innovative Creative Technologies(CINETic) in Bucharest by MA student Dorin Cucicov under the coordination of Alexandru Berceanu.
When it comes to robots and AI, techno-skepticism and dystopian discourses have been at the forefront of popular culture for the past decades. Hollywood movies embody the public fear of artificial machines taking over the world and exterminating humans (or at least the humans as we know them right now). This project joins the debate on sentient machines and how they fit in today's context and social order. Machines becoming sentient may lead to the necessity of including them in the category of personhood where members enjoy rights, freedoms and are protected under the law. This leads to an ethical discussion regarding the development of sentient machines. Is humanity holding back on acknowledging emotions in machines in order to keep this new species at a subordinate level? The attempt of engineering consciousness might help humanity gain deeper insight into the background of this phenomena.
Sentientia listens for the environmental sounds and tries to determine the present emotion. Based on the result, the machine attempts to communicate with the outside world using a combination of sounds generated through bone whistles. Percussion instruments and bone whistles have been the first human made tools to be used for communication between rival and friendly tribes as well as cultural rituals within tribes. Thus Sentientia struggles to establish a communication channel with the primitive tools used by humans and learns from the created dialog how to interact with the outside world. This work uses a machine learning model trained on a database of human recorded emotions.