I just jumped off the plane from Newark, NJ for a medium sized three hour layover in the Chicago airport. On the flight into the windy city I read through an article on a persona I have followed a bit over the years. The article was in WIRED magazine and was simply titled Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity. Well, maybe that title is not so simple nor the ideas being discussed therein. Let me try to summarize, in a few words, the work
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Love Me, Love my Bot “ Duke is careering noisily across a living room floor resplendent in the dark blue and white colours of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He’s no student but a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba. Not only have his owners dressed him up, they have also given him a name and gender. Duke is not alone. Such behaviour is common, and takes myriad forms according to a survey of almost 400 Roomba owners, conducted late last yea
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One of the things I’ve come to realize in the course of this project is how rewarding it can be to look closely at humans’ interactions with computers, mobile devices, and other technologies. Cyberspace, I’m arguing, made sense in a world in which getting online was hard, and there were clearer behavioral divides between the everyday world that we inhabit naturally, and the online “world” that we visited via computer modem. Today, things like the cellphone, iPhone, and Intel’s new Mobile Infor
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New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with Roomba: “Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways,” Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying “Our
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Paul Marks examines in the New Scientist how far people are prepared to go in accepting robots as social partners. “Duke is careering noisily across a living room floor resplendent in the dark blue and white colours of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He’s no student but a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner called the Roomba. Not only have his owners dressed him up, they have also given him a name and gender. Duke is not alone. Such behaviour is common, and takes myriad forms ac
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