Encounters with humanoid robots are new to the everyday experience of children and adults. Yet, increasingly, they are finding their place. This has occurred largely through the introduction of a class of interactive toys (including Furbies, AIBOs, and My Real Babies) that I call “relational artifacts.” Here, I report on several years of fieldwork with commercial relational artifacts (as well as with the MIT AI Laboratory’s Kismet and Cog). It suggests that even these relatively primitive robots have been accepted as companionate objects and are changing the terms by which people judge the “appropriateness” of machine relationships. In these relationships, robots serve as powerful objects of psychological projection and philosophical evocation in ways that are forging a nascent robotics culture.
Sherry Sturkle
Author: julien
Kicking big dog
Bilal robot teaches and demonstrates Islamic prayer
Bilal robot teaches and demonstrates Islamic prayer.
Not quite there
Asimo fall
In one video, for example, a man appears to beat up a woman, strangle her with a string and attempt to suffocate her with a plastic bag. In another, a person does the same things to the robot dinosaur. Affectionate treatment of the robot and the human led to similar patterns of neural activity in regions in the brain’s limbic system, where emotions are processed, fMRI scans showed.
Break a leg!
Danielle was a TALON, a remotely operated robot used for reconnaissance in combat, as well as in tough-to-reach terrain like rocky canyons and caves. […] “Our junior guy named it Danielle so he’d have a woman to cuddle with at night.” Sadly, the romance was not to last: “Danielle got blown up,” Connor says.
As Military Robots Increase, So Does the Complexity of Their Relationship With Soldiers
I can’t define a robot, but I know one when I see one.
Joseph Engelberger