Bonding with robots
This week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science includes a paper describing how toddlers bonded with a robot. Researchers at UC-San Diego placed a humanoid robot in a day care center for five months. And what they found is that the children seemed to bond and socialize with the robot when it was responsive to their actions (e.g., giggling when a toddler touched its head [mpeg movie]). By the end of the five months, the researchers report that the kids treated the robot more like another child than they did a toy.
-Greg Dahlmann
(via)
photo from the paper by Tanaka, et al
Earlier on blog.bioethics.net:
+ Robots Are a Soldier's Best Friend
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I'm curious to know what the informed consent process was, as it is mentioned in the paper but not detailed. This is probably not a big deal, given the limited exposure of the children to the robot, but if the robot were present in the classroom all day for a long period, and were treated as a peer, I wonder if there could be developmental consequences, however minor. Perhaps this would be very unlikely, by the point is that one doesn't know (which is part of the reason this type of research is undertaken). Are these sorts of possibilities discussed with the parents?
- by mikem on Nov 8, 2007 at 2:52 PM | link