Robot Love
- Posted by: Alexandra Marvar
- on July 30, 2008 at 11:38 am
Heart Robot, a creepy Gollum-esque metal-and-circuit infant, is part of a new field of development in robotic science… the emotibot: robots with the ability to respond to human emotion. Other robotic babies have already been birthed by scientists, like this toddler recently in Japan, invented for child behavior research. But Heart Robot and its emotibot siblings are different. They exist to be loved. (For more on this, you should probably pick up a copy of David Levy’s book Love + Sex with Robots. Just don’t let anyone see you reading it.)
Some go so far as to theorize that in half a century, they’ll have the ability to love each other (i.e. robot weddings). But we’re not there yet and it’s already getting uncomfortably bizarre.
In the meantime, there is one emotibot we are completely OK with: Heart Robot’s developers bring us a real live (well, sort of) Wall-E.
