Researchers are working to develop a robot with a personality and which can
behave according to social conventions.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1563000/1563341.stm
They see this as the next step in the evolution of robotics.
"Robotics is getting to the point that a lot of hard problems people have been
dealing with for the past 10 or 20 years are starting to be solved," Allison
Leigh Bruce, from the Robotics Institute, told BBC News Online.
"A lot of interest has been shown in having service robots, or museum tour
guide robots - robots that are going to be inherently living in spaces that
people inhabit and interacting with a lot of people who don't know a lot about
robots."
Friendly face
Researchers believe the answer lies in making robots behave more like people,
starting off by giving them a friendly human face.
"We are doing a lot with facial expression, so when the robot tells you
something, you don't just get the robot's voice, as synthesised speech is very
flat and doesn't have any of the emotional cues people put into their own
speech."
--- --- --- --- ---
Useless hypotheses, etc.:
consciousness, phlogiston, philosophy, vitalism, mind, free will, qualia,
analog computing, cultural relativism, GAC, Cyc, Eliza, cryonics, individual
uniqueness, ego, human values, scientific relinquishment
We move into a better future in proportion as science displaces superstition.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:59 MDT