Kacie Kinzer‘s robots have always depended on the kindness of strangers. They can only drive in one direction, can’t right themselves if they tip over, and can’t sense anything about the world around them. The only thing these “Tweenbots” do have is a cute smiley face and a note asking passersby to please help them get where they want to go. And that simple software works. In a series of trials, Kacie’s Tweenbots were safely directed by the strangers they met from one corner of New York’s busy Washington Square Park to the other. Not a single one was lost, damaged, or stolen. To everyone’s relief, the bomb squad wasn’t called once.
Kacie secretly followed her robots on their merry little ways, filming their encounters with people who crossed their paths.
“They’re very expressive of vulnerability and intention,” Kacie says of her creations. “My robots would make a very pathetic noise when they got caught in a pothole or under a bench. The motors would grind and whine. Something about that speaks to people” — especially people with dogs, she says. “I have a lot of footage that becomes almost too cute, because the person, the dog, and the robot are all interacting.” People routinely talked to the little wandering bots, even turning them away from trouble — for example, if one was trundling off into traffic.
Kacie thinks one reason people are so eager to help her robots is because they identify with their struggle to get from one place to the next. Maybe, in helping these defenseless, smiling robots, people are helping themselves.
There’s some science to support this. Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, recently found hard evidence of something most of us intuitively know: people give human traits to objects around them as a way of alleviating loneliness. “Non-human connections can be very powerful,” Epley said. “A brain’s not so sensitive to whether it’s a person or not. If it’s something that has a lot of traits associated with what it means to be a human, then all the better for us, it seems.”
And what’s more human than struggling to find your way in the world?
and 
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I’m sure the fact everyone thought they were being filmed (which they were, surprise!) had something to do with it though.
The Japanese are much more in tune with this than Westerners. For example, they are very concerned with the “Face” on a car, whereas Westerners don’t even understand the concept and regard the cars’ “Face” as a design accident.
This question of machine-consciousness is an old one. The best answer is Ray Kurzweil’s–
Someday (in the very near future) a robot (or computer) will make a very convincing argument that it is a conscious being….and we will believe it. We will just accept it. Get used to it.
I did just that the other day for a female mallard duck and 10 newly hatched ducklings. They needed to get out of a parking lot and over to the nearby pond. Too cute to ignore!
“And what’s more human than struggling to find your way in the world?”
Opposable thumbs.
“And what’s more human than struggling to find your way in the world?”
The urge to pick up a blunt object and smack someone with it.
I like that the park official lent a hand and didn’t try to remove the robot.
This post teaches us more about the psychology of attraction over altruism. Now if she wants to truely suceed in this validating altruism try branching to other cities or areas of NYC. I can bet different results.
I like it when humans help me when I run aground and get my gears get all grindy, in order to find my way in the world.
maybe if humans were walking around with little white flags declaring our difficulties we would all be headed in our own right directions?