Nurses don’t explicitly tell the patients Paro is a robot

“People are able to connect with this robot. It’s designed to behave in a way and interact with the person so that you want to touch it, you want to pet it, you want to interact with it. They have the same reaction that they do to any other cute animal or cute baby.”

Robotic seals comfort dementia patients but raise ethical concerns

Give robots ‘personhood’ status, EU committee argues

Give robots ‘personhood’ status, EU committee argues

The proposed legal status for robots would be analogous to corporate personhood

Let’s just give robots the rights to experience the same sociopathic behavior we gave to the corporations who build them.

/via Julian Oliver

Robotic kiss

And then there’s the Turing test for kissing. In this experiment, each subject will use the Kissenger to send and receive kisses from two anonymous individuals, and will again be asked to rate their feelings of pleasure and empathy for their partners. But the test subjects won’t know that one of those partners was just a computer program simulating the pressure patterns of a human kiss. Will they be able to tell the difference?

Robotic Kiss Transmitter Lets You Smooch a Loved One From Afar

Animal-like machine responding to your every move

Madeline Gannon has a pretty clear discourse about the goal of her research and although she tends to blur the boundary between humans and robots, she clearly keeps them in the realm of objects.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said about the description under the video. Clearly Pier 9 is making it sound ridiculous by anthropomorphizing Mimus.

Mimus is a giant industrial robot that’s curious about the world around her. Mimus sees the world differently than us – she uses sensors embedded in the ceiling above to see everyone around her simultaneously. Mimus can react and move quickly around her space to follow your actions and try to decipher your body language.

(source)