Pepper the robot can perform funerary rites, but it shouldn’t.
It’s meant to help bring down the costs of funerary services in Japan, where (as elsewhere) they can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. But this is just a bad, dumb idea.
It’s a bad idea to introduce autonomy, or any machine really, into a situation that fundamentally calls for respect and sympathy, because machines have neither.
Judging from the reaction of the audience to this “performance”, I might not be the only one doubting that interaction is really happening. And why do you insist so much that you are not “scary”? Trying to prove a point?
(source)
A drunken man arrested after kicking a Pepper robot in a fit of rage at a SoftBank Corp. store, police said.
Security footage shows the drunken Ishikawa kicking the robot, according to the police. Investigators said the damaged Pepper now moves slower and that its internal computer system may have been broken.
Drunken Kanagawa man arrested after kicking SoftBank robot | The Japan Times
