Jamais Cascio, co-founder of World Changing and now my colleague at Institute for the Future, has posted an insightful essay about how robots that just verge on "lifelike" can sometimes be quite creepy. Cascio's thoughts were spurred by MIT techno-sociologist Sherry Turkle's recent experience bringing My Real Baby dolls, a robotic toy that flopped, into nursing homes. The human-machine love that emerged there freaked her out. (For a fictional take on this notion, see Jenn Shreve's short story Whooping It Up In The Uncanny Valley.) From Jamais's post at Open the Future:
Instead of sex-bots driving the industry, emotional companions for the aged and depressed may end up being the leading edge of the field of personal robotics. These would not be care-givers in the robot nurse sense; instead, they'd serve as recipients of care provided by the human partner, as it is increasingly clear that the tasks of taking care of someone else can be a way out of the depths of depression. In this scenario, the robot's needs would be appropriate to the capabilities of the human, and the robot may in some cases serve as a health monitoring system, able to alert medical or emergency response personnel if needed. In an interesting counter-point to Turkle's fear of humans building bonds with objects that can not understand pain and death, these robots may well develop abundant, detailed knowledge of their partner's health conditions.
