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Robot Becomes One of the Kids
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have found that toddlers treat a small robot as a peer rather than a toy. A team from the University of California, San Diego, placed Sony's QRIO in a classroom of kids aged 18 months to 2 years and watched them interact. Over time the children grew to treat the robot as one of them — playing games with the robot, hugging it, and covering it up with a blanket when its batteries ran down."
For example.. take this sentence:
games with the robot, hugging it, and covering it up with a blanket and replace robot with dog.Would that be news worthy? No. Why? Because its in the nature of most children to play games and take cares of others(because that is what people do to them.) This does not mean they see it as a peer. They see it as a pet.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
most young children also treat inanimate dolls or stuffed animals as peers
why is this so groundbreaking?
...Androids will not need to mimic human appearance, skin resilience and temperature, etc. with high fidelity.
Human beings are sufficiently capable of anthropomorphizing... or empathizing... to treat even obviously non-humanoid things as human. (As witness the bonding between humans and pets).
Robots only need to be reasonably human-like in appearance and behavior, and humans will meet them more than halfway.
And, of course, and unfortunately, human beings are also capable of treating actual human beings as not human.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
People are probably more likely to "socialize" with a robot if they can put it in its own separate category easily. Interacting with a non-human intelligence yet human container is bound to be disturbing (it's one of the sources of the uncanny valley)
As a not-yet-phd'ed proto-psychologist, here's how I'd put it: Kids this age are unclear on what has agency and what doesn't. They are also unclear on the division between themselves and other people - they think that everyone can see what they see, for instance, and knows what they are thinking or feeling to a certain extent and thinks/feels the same way. Add these two together, and they attribute agency to something that *acts* like other things with agency, plus assume that because it has agency, it thinks/feels/has the same needs as they do.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Would you feel better if the kids call their wooden doll as their "new friend"? This has been going on for as long as toys have existed.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
So it isn't just a robot, artificially intelligent enough to fool toddlers. It's something of a human-controlled puppet, with them telling it to do more advanced things than it could figure out on its own.
So, I guess, basically a PR stunt for Sony.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And he notes that the male pronoun is the default in the English language - and does not imply gender. (English lacks gender, unlike many other languages.)
People said things like "it's trying to get out of the corner" and such. It's not "trying" anything, it's just following a set of equations (that I wrote) which are slightly too simple.
What's the difference?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Oh, but is it? And why? Knowing that some people innately prefer children, that humans find it almost impossible to completely control or suppress their sex drive, and that we can't just kill pedophiles out of hand when they are discovered - logically such a device would end up saving children from molestation? Let's assume a pedophile starts with a Roomba, and adds to it piece by piece until it resembles an animatronic underage Real Doll - at what point does it become illegal?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.