Simon Mills/Corbis
Think your electronics don’t have feelings? Well now, thanks to the work of Dr. Lola Canamero, they do. Be scared.
We’ve all mocked that friend of ours who takes the emotions of their inanimate electronics a bit too seriously. (My brother hugs his iMac goodnight.) But because of the headway made by Canamero’s interdisciplinary project FEELIX GROWING (Feel, Interact, eXpress), they could be vindicated. This program is the first attempt to apply early attachment models of humans and primates to robotics programming. The result is robots equipped to exhibit anger, fear, sadness, happiness, excitement, pride, and distress. Not only that — they’re programming allows them to adapt (quite deliberately) to their “caregivers” and form a sense of attachment similar to that of infant to parent.
As we said before, be scared. (via Toronto Sun)