Robo Facies: A New Species of Facial Intelligence

For millions of years, the face belonged to the realm of living beings. When a face turned towards us, there was an organism behind it. The eyes belonged to a biological system capable of seeing, the muscles were controlled by a neural architecture, the skin followed the movements of the underlying tissues, and what appeared on the facial surface was part of a living body. The human brain evolved within that world. We learned to detect faces, follow gazes, recognise movements, anticipate behaviours, and respond to signals produced by other organisms. The face became one of the most powerful territories of human communication precisely because, throughout our evolutionary history, there was a profound relationship between what we saw and the biological architecture that produced it. That relationship is no longer exclusive. For the first time, we are building faces that were never born. Faces produced through engineering, moved by actuators, controlled by algorithms, and progressively capable of observing the person before them, processing information, and modifying their own behaviour in response to that observation. The change may appear to be merely technological, but its consequences are far more profound. We are not simply placing eyes, a mouth, and artificial skin on a machine. We are introducing an artificial entity into one of the oldest perceptual and social systems of our species, argues Prof. Freitas-Magalhães, the world's leading expert for Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology and the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, by Elsevier, Oxford, in this new and extraordinary book on robo facies and facial expression of emotion.