This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Have you ever talked to your computer, cursed it for making a mistake?

PC load letter?

Is that me?

Have you ever argued with the traffic directions you get from Google Maps or Waze?

Starting route to Grover's Mill Road.

Have you ever looked at a Rumba cleaning the floor on the other side of the room and told it?

Please come over to this side.

Turn left.

Here I am.

Left.

It just ran itself right off of the edge.

Robots and artificial intelligence are playing an ever larger role in all of our lives.

Of course, this is not the role that science fiction once imagined.

It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear.

Robots bent on our destruction, remained the stuff of movies like Terminator.

And Robots sentience is still an idea that's far off in the future.

But there's a lot we're learning about smart machines and there's a lot that smart machines

are teaching us about how we connect with the world around us and with each other.

This week on Hidden Brain, can robots teach us what it means to be human?

My guest today has spent a lot of time thinking about how we interact with smart machines

and how those interactions might change the way we relate to one another.

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