“Through a series of experiments, researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) aimed to increase understanding of collective animal behavior, including learning how robots might someday steer fish away from environmental disasters. Nature is a growing source of inspiration for engineers, and the researchers were intrigued to find that their biomimetic robotic fish could not only infiltrate and be accepted by the swimmers, but actually assume a leadership role.”
What Makes a Robot Fish Attractive? Robot Fish Moves to the Head of the School, via debcha.
“Overall, young adults (university undergraduates) have been found to have a preference for a human-like appearance of robots. However, as compared to others, introverts and individuals with low emotional stability are more likely to prefer mechanical looking robots.
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Robot appearance not only affects preference, but also people‟s perceptions of the robot’s personality. For instance, in an examination of the relationship between robot appearance and personality, one study found that children between the age of 9 and 11 considered robots with mixed human-robot features to be friendlier than completely mechanical looking robots. However, they judged pure human-like robots (i.e., robots modeled after human form and features) to be the most aggressive of all other robots.”
“‘all credit and respect to those devoting their time to pushing the technology forward, but, in finally getting to see some of this technology in the ‘flesh’, I was struck by how blind, dumb, clunky, inaccurate, rudimentary and generally limited these machine are. Robot uprising? Currently as likely as a government coup performed by spoons’”
“IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind “Jeopardy”-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments
IBM’s Watson to offer medical advice to doctors”
“Siri grew out of a huge project inside the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), those people who previously gave you the internet and, more recently, a scheme to encourage people to develop driverless cars. Siri’s parent project, called Calo (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) had $200m of funding and was the US’s largest-ever artificial intelligence project. In 2007 it was spun out into a separate business; Apple quietly acquired it in 2010, and incorporated it into its new phone.”
“Companies will soon sell robots designed to baby-sit children, replace workers in nursing homes, and serve as companions for people with disabilities. All of which to Turkle is demeaning, “transgressive,” and damaging to our collective sense of humanity. It’s not that she’s against robots as helpers—building cars, vacuuming floors, and helping to bathe the sick are one thing. She’s concerned about robots that want to be buddies, implicitly promising an emotional connection they can never deliver”
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At the moment physical products have functions - what they do. And they have characters or personalities - how they feel.
And some things, a few things, have behaviours - ways of performing those functions that step outside the strictly functional. They convey personality through actions, not just through appearance and materials.
And, crucially, those behaviours can change in ways that the functions and the materials can’t. Because the behaviours are in the software, not the hardware
”“Unless the behaviours and personalities of these things that compute are designed well enough the things that are not so good about them or unavoidable have the potential to come across as flaws in the object’s character, break the suspension of disbelief and do more harm than good”
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Mainly that I’m not so sure if the single voice approach is a good thing or not. I think a house that appears to be run by an omnipresent robot like HAL might feel a bit threatening and I would like to try out individual feeds for each sensor to see if that feels a little less dominating - or just too noisy. I’m also going to experiment with the frequency of messaging and the language it uses to see how that affects things.
I’m sure there’s a sweet spot where it all feels quite natural and I have a feeling it lies somewhere close to the metaphor of a butler and servants in that the servants tell the butler everything but the butler only tells you when you really need to know something. You wouldn’t actively listen to the servants but if there was a problem you could bypass the butler and listen to what they were saying directly.
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