Sure, you know how adorable Pleo is when you’re being all cute and cuddly with him. But what’s going to happen when someone’s Ritalin-addicted nephew is left alone with the hapless dinosaur for even a few minutes? While waiting to conduct our full, hands-on review, we decided to answer that question with a series of unauthorized — and let’s be honest — somewhat cruel tests. Be forewarned, in the video you’ll see Pleo: beaten and abused [ watch the video Pleo is here! But how much punishment can a robot dinosaur take? ]
Anthropomorphizing of computers has been going on since real bugs were ruining computer code. As people spend more time with technology and technology gets more user friendly the line between flesh and blood creatures and silicon creatures will get thinner.
One of my favorite books The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul
One of the more interesting things we’ve learned about anthropomorphizing is that people are very forgiving of the flaws in robots and computers that do not closely mimic live beings in appearance or in action. In the 1990s robots and software began to more closely resemble actual living beings. Instead of finding the flaws cute, people were put off by them and creeped out. Who could forget Microsofts ‘Clippy’? By making the robots and bots look and behave more like humans, we raised the bar on what we expected from them. When they failed people found it troubling. Pleo seems to elicit strong responses by being cute, not realistic and having a range of responses.
More information:
Killing a Pleo robotic dinosaur
2 responses so far ↓
1 unwesen // Jan 11, 2008 at 5:37 am
That’s a pretty fragile toy.
In relation to being creeped out by robots that more closely mimic living creatures, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley gives a good overview.
2 admin // Jan 11, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Thanks for the link. I wonder if the people of the early industrial age felt this way about machines too? Or if it is something specific to human and animal like machines? I’ll have to dig into that when I catch a free minute.
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