A neat little robot...

[quandrus]

Weird, I find myself thinking it would be cool to have one of these things wheeling around the house.

http://www.incx.nec.co.jp/robot/english/childcare/index.html

Comments

[quandrus]

Interesting... I've kept a lid on some of my ideas about pets, actually. Maybe I'll go into that another time.

The 'nanny' concept that NEC is pushing seems simply ridiculous to me. 'Toy' or 'playmate' seems like a better fit, but I think it would be very unwise to try and have these devices supervise kids. It wouldn't be the kids I'd be worried about, actually. I think the current batch of kids is being supervised too much already.

Now, if someone could create a kind of 'tamagachi' robot buddy to tag around with right kind of kid, that might actually be a noble thing. There is some value in having a kid take care of something or look after a sibling or pet. Remember that there are millions of kids living in apartments with restrictive or prohibitive pet rules, especially in cities like Japan. I think that might be an ideal situation for an autonomous 'doll-droid.' One of the better scenes in that movie AI involved that kid's teddy bear. It's all a matter of context, I guess.

Right now I'm reading Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson and am totally intrigued by the animated book in it that instructs this four year old girl how to get out of an apartment with abusive adults. Maybe I'm still infatuated by the Pinocchio mythos, but the possibilities of cybernetics put a different spin on it for me. If it were ever possible to incarnate logic itself into the form of a little kid and raise it as a human child, I'd probably find myself compelled to sign up. What a strange world that would be. There have been some controversial books out about how some people have pets instead of kids. I can just imagine what would happen if junior came in a box with assembly instructions.

Q