I wonder how a RealDoll (link is NSFW) would do?

Researchers are giving a robot its own Facebook profile page to help foster meaningful relationships with people.

The page will be populated with interactions the robot has with people as well as photos of the time it spends in human company.

Its creators hope that embedding it in a social web will demonstrate that a sustainable friendship can grow up between man and machine.

The coupling of robot and social network is the idea of Dr Nikolaus Mavridis and co-researchers as they look into ways of overcoming the reluctance of people to stay in touch with robots.

While robots that can engage people have been produced before now, research suggests that humans lose interest – at most a few weeks after being introduced – as the behavioural repertoire of the machine is exhausted.

In a paper on the pre-print website Arxiv.org server, the researchers say they want to find out if this can be thwarted by giving humans and robots a pool of shared memories and if they are part of the same social circle of friends.
[…]
The prototype is based on a PeopleBot machine from ActivRobots to which they have added a range finder, touch screen and stereo camera. The current prototype is called “Sarah” but when the project begins this will be swapped for a machine with the face of Islamic scholar Ibn Sina, aka Avicenna.




  1. Mac Guy says:

    Not malfunction, Stephanie. Number 5… is alive!

  2. JM says:

    I can’t think of any reason why I would want a meaningfull and sustainable relationship with a machine pretending to be my friend.

  3. Paddy-O says:

    What a bunch of nut jobs.

  4. MrMiGu says:

    and with this we become one step closer to judgement day

  5. Olo Baggins of Bywater says:

    My robot can do twitter.

    This one isn’t mine, it belongs to the control software developer:
    http://twitter.com/samtherobot


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