Robotics expert doesn’t necessarily agree. From Nautilus:
What has working with robots taught you about being human?
It has taught me to have a huge appreciation for the nuances of human behavior and the inconsistencies of humans. There are so many aspects of human unpredictability that we don’t have a model for. When you watch a ballet or a dance or see a great athlete and realize the amazing abilities, you start to appreciate those things that are uniquely human. The ability to have an emotional response, to be compelling, to be able to pick up on subtle emotional signals from others, those are all things that we haven’t made any progress on with robots.
What’s the most creative thing a robot has done?
One of my favorites is by the engineer and media artist Raffaello D’Andrea. He worked with a sculptor and they designed a chair that would suddenly collapse. There was a pause and then all the pieces would start to move, find each other, and reassemble into a chair. There’s something very elegant about this idea of a chair that’s designed to fall apart and come back together on its own. It brings up all these whimsical ideas of magic and yet it’s a beautiful and very complex machine.
That would work great in an old age home if nothing but “whimsical” mattered. – O’Leary for News