Tag: robot

Painting with a Roomba and International Klein Blue

Addie Wagenknecht, Self portrait–loneliness is what we can’t do for each other. IKB dry pigment and resin on canvas. 80 x 90 in / 203.2 x 228.6 cm. 2017. Courtesy of bitforms gallery.

[…] as we become more dependent on digital devices to mediate our actions and interactions, we begin to experience them as “creatures” instead of machines and form bonds with them.

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« It’s much sexier to call something a robot than call something a dishwasher »

This nuance is important, because “robot” is a powerful word. It is at once something that makes people uncomfortable (killer robots, job-stealing robots, etc.) and that makes them feel nice (Kuri the extremely endearing companion robot). “The word robot generates a lot of attention and fascination and sometimes fear,” says Darling. “You can use it to get people’s attention. I mean, it’s much sexier to call something a robot than call something a dishwasher.”

Wired – What is a robot?

Funeral robot can neither express or feel respect

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.