Robots are becoming our friends, perhaps even supplanting pets – there’s a growing trend that leaves doggy beauty pageants in the shade. This affection is more explicable when you consider that Roombas clean up mess where dogs traditionally create it. Left to roam their owners’ houses unattended, the robotic vacuums have wormed their way into human hearts by freeing them up for more creative pursuits – like dressing them up, for instance.
The company that makes them, iRobot, also makes mineclearing robots for the U.S. military. Reports suggest that soldiers too can get remarkably attached to their robotic pals, becoming distressed when the chop shop simply can’t fix them anymore. In the home vacuum models, this connection between man and machine is encouraged by a wing of marketing known as ‘emotional design’ to encourage empathy between skin and circuits. There is no return of affection, of course – rather like owning a cat, you might say – but one finds it hard to imagine the principle would be extended to cover military products. Perhaps a special new robot is under construction, to infiltrate enemy ranks and manipulate them emotionally, sowing dissent and discord by batting its silicon eyelashes and making provocative comments about rifle size.
This bond will soon be instilled at an early age. Researchers are discovering nursery-age children react well to robots than can ‘dance and giggle’. Soon all our children will be like that boy in the first Battlestar Galactica, wandering around chatting to a robot dog. Although in the 70s, Muffit II had to be played by a trained chimp – the technology wasn’t around then, y’see. Would be a different story now.
One could argue that animals are simply flesh and blood machines overlaid with instincts similar to programming, so we would be as wrong to anthropomorphise one as the other. But News Hour finds that a rather cold perspective.
News hour, with Jerry Caesar 
