Tag: empathy

Kiwibots win fans at UC Berkeley as they deliver fast food at slow speeds

The Kiwibots do not figure out their own routes.
Instead, people in Colombia […] plot “waypoints” for the bots to follow, sending them instructions every five to 10 seconds on where to go.

As with other offshoring arrangements, the labor savings are huge. The Colombia workers, who can each handle up to three robots, make less than $2 an hour, which is above the local minimum wage.

Kiwibots win fans at UC Berkeley as they deliver fast food at slow speed

As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines

As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines

To Walmart executives, the Auto-C self-driving floor
scrubber is the future of retail automation — a multimillion-dollar bet
that advanced robots will optimize operations, cut costs and
revolutionize the American superstore.

But to
the workers of Walmart Supercenter No. 937 in Marietta, Ga., the machine
has a different label: “Freddy,” named for a janitor the store let go
shortly before the Auto-C rolled to life.

The Uncanny Valley

The Uncanny Valley: The Original Essay by Masahiro Mori

More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley.