lickety jackblog

This Week in Robots

The lives of robots and the routes by which they are being insinuated into our lives continue to be a topic of incredible interest. I've posted a lot about robots and their uses. Sometimes these uses are ingenious, sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious. Robots are patrolling streets and skies, they're building cars, exploring space, helping autistic children. They're battling pirates on the high seas.

And now they're hanging out with old people.

Well, "now" isn't really accurate. This article indicates that research of this type has been going on since 2002.

That's right. One of the many roles of robots in this Brave New World we're forging is to masquerade as dogs to alleviate the loneliness of the elderly. Frankly, it's touching. How could we go to war with these gentle dog-bots? They're our new best friends. They're watching our grandmothers and our grandfathers.

There's something very odd to me about the idea that the elderly would be among the first populations to co-habitate with robots. The world is a weird place, and I think it must be very weird to be old here. Appliances far less exotic than a robotic dog may well be enough to baffle elderly folks, or at least inspire the kind of ambivalence that comes from looking at something too alien to even consider. I think that for my 92 year old grandma, computers basically don't exist. But is it possible that in a few years she might be welcoming a robotic companion into her home? What kind of lifestyle are these people suddenly living? What, if anything, do they think about being soothed by robots? Maybe I'm not really indicating why I think this is so...strange. But strange it is. Imagine: There is a small dog yapping at my grandmother's ankles as she writes letters, plays a crossword or solitaire or watches Maury Povich. He's plastic. (He's a "he".) He's pretending to be hungry, but there's no food for him. My grandmother pats his head, her painted fingernails and rings and knobbly arthritic knuckles clacking on his head and she says to this machine "Shush, little dog, shush." A voice-recognition program relays this to a microchip that's programmed to understand English, but not too well. Just well enough. His small, red eyes dim and he lays and powers down. She goes back to her correspondence, writing to someone about someone else who has died, because they are old. She's so glad that a robot is sleeping on her floor. She's comforted.

Elsewhere, robots are digging up rocks on Mars.

Curiouser and curiouser.

posted by dan @ 11:09 AM