This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Who eats whom? — Will robots eat us? Or will we eat robots? Both technophiles and -phobes have hungered to learn which will happen first. The answer has now arrived, in a report from a team at […]
Researchers in Japan gave children the opportunity to spontaneously abuse robots, and studied what then happened. (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.) They produced this video and these studies about that: “Escaping from Children’s Abuse of Social Robots,” Drazen Brscić, Hiroyuki Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Takayuki Kanda, In Proceedings of the Tenth […]
If you were obliged to receive healthcare instructions from a machine rather than a human, which would you prefer, a robot or a tablet? ‘People respond better to robots than computer tablets delivering healthcare instructions’ say a team from the Department of Psychological Medicine, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at The University […]
“Generally speaking, modeling the developmental trajectory for almost any intelligent task that a 2-year-old child can perform on a robot is a potential research topic for us.” – explains the website of the Developmental Robotics Lab at Iowa State University, US. As an example to help clarify the (somewhat ambiguous) statement above, see the lab’s […]
