So this morning, as I'm getting ready for work, I hear an NPR story on toddlers and robots. The wonderful neuro-scientists, behavoralists and engineers at SONY are testing a 'bot and it's ability to socialize and be accepted by toddlers. But that's not where the story gets weird...
Turns out this story is a perennial thing on the news circuit. Through the power of the church of google, and while trying to dig up a media report on the Sony robots, I found a ton of press releases on the 'bots Sony is developing. The Sony version of the humanoid 'bot is the Qrio, and the "entertainment" 'bot, effectively a robot dog, is part of a group called AIBO.
Robo-SPOT is alive! And has voice recognition abilites!
And ....And Robo-SPOT understands English and Spanish!
And it turns out they've been running the machine-interaction lab with toddlers for a few years now, if this is the same lab (which I think it is....) Read all about how robots are teacher's little helpers: Robots attend UCSD nursery school in research study
Of course there are the detractors, namely child care providers. In a lovely and lo-tech site, the potential digital outsourcers are listed.
Daycare workers fear their jobs will be taken by robots....
Does this strike you as cool or creepy? Robots taking over? I can't really imagine playing hopscotch with Qrio but maybe I'm just too old school....
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Robots versus Babies
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5 comments:
Robots creep me the hell out, and I would never allow my kid to help make a more human robot. That being said, I listened to the NPR story too yesterday. What I found the most interesting was how high the toddler's threshhold for acceptance actually was. The robot had to act like them in order to be accepted - not the other way around. I think it's surprising how resiliant the kids were to novelty (ooh! a robot! drop everything! which is what all of us would do. don't lie.)
I think you'd really like 60secondscience.com (not to keep self-promoting or anything, but we've covered a bunch of the science stories you seem to like. Also: http://www.60secondscience.com/archive/health-news-articles-medicine-news/best-recall-ever-australian-to.php)
also: http://www.60secondscience.com/archive/science-technology-news/nasa-a-decade-or-so-from-launc.php
cross posting in the comments, not even in a post... I'm starting a "draft joe back to HON" movement
I'm totally here, and, frankly, I've seen at least half of our stories from 60secondscience.com show up here. We're pretty witty, too. So maybe HON should come visit me at the office.
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