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What Sex is Your Robot?

Posted by michael on from the battery-powered dept.

Ant writes "Technology Review has an article about how the more robots interact with humans, the more important their apparent gender becomes."

2 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. I want my robot to be... robotic by pubjames · · Score: 4, Insightful


    I want my robot to be... robotic

    Seriously. I can't be the only one that finds it really annoying when my Windows XP machine modifies the way it behaves because it is guessing what I want to do. It's damn irritating. Or when it suggests I might want to clean icons off my desktop, or whatever.

    I do not want my robot to start cleaning things I haven't told it to clean. Or comment on the fact that it's a nice day. Or try to be funny or cute. Just do as I say. You're a frickin' machine.

  2. Re:It's a Unic by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful


    Honestly, as robot builder I find this a little boring. It has little to do with robotics. You can take the same robot and give it a different costume and maybe a new voice to change it's sex... big deal.

    Man, you'd think that people would learn from the mistakes of others. But, no... a whole new field for hackers to ignore the UI and claim that "as long as it does it's task, who cares what it looks like". How many years until we get the equivilent of KDE/Gnome type projects for robots?

    iBot?

    WinBot?