‘Robot scary, robot scary.’

DISCOVER, with the National Science Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University, posed questions to four experts in a panel discussion and in video interviews with each scientist individually. Rodney Brooks of MIT founded iRobot, maker of the Roomba, discussed testing robots with children. Notice how this sort of progress directly feeds into machine sentience:

The first thing we realized was that robots designed beautifully by engineers did not work in this environment. After two or three interactions, the babies got bored with them. Then we started designing children’s robots with smile detection. When we first turned one on, the kids started running around in panic. My son was one of the testers and I could hear him say, ‘Robot scary, robot scary.’ By the end of the project, though, mothers were telling me, “Javier, I am a little bit concerned that my child is constantly talking about your robot.” We had progressed that much. Critical to our success was the fact that we were always going to the field and testing. It was critical to put some form of emotional mechanism into these robots.