The researchers measured the bond between the children and the robot in several ways. Firstly, as with other toddlers, they touched QRIO mostly on the arms and hands, rather than on the face or legs. For this age group, “the amount of touching is a good predictor of how you are doing as a social being”, Movellan says. The children also treated QRIO with more care and attention than a similar-looking but inanimate robot that the researchers called Robby, which acted as a control in the experiment. Once they had grown accustomed to QRIO, they hugged it much more than Robby, who also received far more rough treatment. A panel, who watched videos of the interactions between the children and QRIO, concluded that these interactions increased in quality over several months. Eventually, the children seemed to care about the robot’s well being. They helped it up when it fell, and played “care-taking” games with it – most commonly, when QRIO’s batteries ran out of juice and it lay down, a toddler would come up and cover it with a blanket and say “night, night”. Altering QRIO’s behaviour also changed the children’s attitude towards the robot. When the researchers programmed QRIO to spend all its time dancing, the kids quickly lost interest. When the robot went back to its old self, the kids again treated it like a peer again. |link via|

From A robot performs standup comedy to a lackluster response by Michael Drucker in McSweeney’s I was made in a factory. The funny setup is that robots make new robots. You, as a human, are probably thinking, “I would love to spend all day making more humans because the sexual experience is pleasurable to my flesh.” However, the point of irony is that robots make new robots—but we do not have sex. We use lasers and molten metal. Am I right?

Area A DARPA‘s Urban Grand Challenge ran over the weekend, with CMU/GM taking first place, and Stanford/VW taking second. This situation was exactly reversed for the 2005 Grand Challenge, which means the rivalry between Stanford and Carnegie Mellon is building to epic proportions. More info here and here. I’ve been following this challenge for a few years now, using the Nova special on the 2005 race for my classes. The big change for this race involves the car responding to other agents in its environment, including other moving cars (driven by professional stunt drivers), and for obeying all traffic laws, including right-of-way laws at intersections. I went to a couple of the site visits and the first thing (one of) the vehicles did for me was a three-way turn. Now, imagine you’re watching this vehicle all by itself do a three-way turn and then come to an intersection, and there was a car there already and when it pulled up, another car pulled up after it. It knew enough to wait for the first car to go because by the rules, it knew that car had precedent. But it also knew that it had precedence over the other car that showed up after. It was stunning. … I mean it was spooky because they went down the road, they made a turn. And he turned to me and he said, ‘Now look, there’s nobody inside there right?’ I said, ‘No, no, there’s nobody inside there.’ He said, ‘Now, and there’s nobody controlling them remotely right’ because it looked like they were being driven by somebody. Now these were the two vehicles that got the furthest, by the way. |link| There remains the critical problem that the robots are still treating other drivers merely as moving objects, and not as full-bodied […]

thx torff

Concerning the recent robot killing spree: But contrary to some reports, the tragic accident was not the result of an automated or robotic weapon going out of control… the incident is more likely the result of a simple mechanical failure. link via dc. more

Awesome new vid by the creator of The machine is us/ing us. Link via BoingBoing. This works perfectly to counteract the arguments Dreyfus uses in his On the Internet.

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via oocc

xkcd via dc

Of the Force of Imagination, Montaigne There was lately seene a cat about my owne house, so earnestly eyeing a bird, sitting upon a tree, that he seeing the cat, they both so wistly fixed their looks one upon another, so long, that at last the bird fell downe as dead in the cat’s pawes, either drunken by his owne strong imagination, or drawne by some attractive power of the cat. Those that love hawking, have haply heard the Falkner tale, who earnestly fixing his sight upon a kite in the aire, laid a wager that with the only force of his looke, he would make it come stooping downe to the ground, and as some report did it many times. The histories I borrow, I referre to the consciences of those I take them from. The discourses are mine, and hold together by the proofe of reason, not of experiences: each man may adde his example to them: and who hath none, considering the number and varietie of accidentes let him not leave to think, there are store of them. If I come not well for my selfe, let another come for me.

Love in the digital age @ blogs.NYT.com. Thanks, Michele! HTEC LIVES! Communication has been streamlined by the Internet, and something essential to the process of falling in love has been lost. We can type up carefully crafted statements rather than go face-to-face and improvise from the heart, thereby risking embarrassment, vulnerability or Oscar-worthy dialogue. We can Google our way into the museums of each other’s identities — and fall in love there. If we get up the nerve to e-mail or IM our love interests, we can correspond at a comfortable pace (i.e., however long it takes us to come up with witty, well-crafted messages). They will assume we’re taking our time to respond because we’re busy fighting off that parade of knights in shining armor who are begging to be listed with us in a Facebook relationship. They don’t know we’re staring longingly at that one picture that pops up when we Google them, and we don’t have to worry about whether or not they’re staring longingly back! (Bonus: No one has to deal with that awkward “who’s paying?” question.) Flirting has been transformed into a digital process. We don’t even have to touch each other to “hook up.” We can just hook up to the Internet. The difficulty of negotiating what happens in each arena of reality probably explains why the word “awkward” has shot to the top of my generation’s lexicon. My classmates and I charade our way through first dates, trying to keep track of what’s been said versus what’s been read on the Internet ahead of time. We have to fake it through “Where are you from?” conversation, and if we let something slip that reveals we’ve done our research, it’s awkward. I think the article is fundamentally mistaken. Nothing essential has been lost in […]

Sex and marriage with robots? It could happen @ MSNBC.com, filed under ‘Innovation’. via /. At first, sex with robots might be considered geeky, “but once you have a story like ‘I had sex with a robot, and it was great!’ appear someplace like Cosmo magazine, I’d expect many people to jump on the bandwagon,” Levy said.