“I can see a robot standing in front of a crowd, looking at faces—probably a lot like the way theyre scanning license plates on the interstate now—and very rapidly reading the room and accurately predicting the emotional state of its audience,” says Bruce Duncan, the team leader of a privately commissioned humanoid robot called Bina48.
via Data, The Worlds First Comic Robot: Humor: GQ.
I saw Data give this performance at SXSW this year. We anthropomorphize robots, and people relate differently to embodied technology.
We’re still a ways off from the singularity, but they sure are getting smart enough that we believe they have feelings. And how we design them affects our experiences and how we treat each other. Really great social experiment Heather is running. More about SXSW 2013 from me here.
GREG SWAN 