“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
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
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
Monkeys mourn robot baby in groundbreaking new BBC show
Don’t look surprised, US soldiers have shown the same behavior.
A robot went out of control at the China Hi-Tech Fair 2016 in Shenzhen on Thursday, smashing a glass window and injuring a visitor. The robot that went violent is named “Fatty” and is designed for household use.
(source)
Robot learns to play with Lego by watching human teachers
Part of being a good teacher is understanding that the device that you’re teaching has different ways of acting in the world and different ways of perceiving it
Billard
Security Robot Knocks Toddler To The Ground Then Runs Him Over At Stanford Shopping Center
A Palo Alto toddler was injured last Thursday after his parents claim a security robot at the Stanford Shopping Center knocked him over and then proceeded to run him over
In Emergencies, Should You Trust a Robot?
In emergencies, people may trust robots too much for their own safety, a new study suggests. In a mock building fire, test subjects followed instructions from an “Emergency Guide Robot” even after the machine had proven itself unreliable – and after some participants were told that robot had broken down.
People seem to believe that these robotic systems know more about the world than they really do, and that they would never make mistakes or have any kind of fault,
Alan Wagner, a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute
Nobody Wants Social Robots That Look Like Humans Because They Threaten Our Identity
Over the last several years, when surveys have asked people (in Europe and Japan) about how they feel about robots in their lives, along with a positive perception of robots in general there was a significant amount of resistance to the idea of anthropomorphic robots doing things like
teaching children or taking care of the elderly.