I, Robovie

Undiscovered

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Society & Culture, 805813, Science, History, Friday, Studios

4.6 • 768 Ratings

🗓️ 11 September 2018

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A decade ago, psychologists introduced a group of kids to Robovie, a wide-eyed robot who could talk, play, and hug like a pro. And then, the researchers did something heartbreaking to Robovie! They wanted to see just how far kids’ empathy for a robot would go. What the researchers didn’t gamble on was just how complicated their own feelings for Robovie would get.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Listener supported WNYC Studios.
0:10.0	This is undiscovered.
0:15.8	It's 1999, the fifth floor of Carnegie Mellon's computer science building.
0:21.6	And in one cinder block lab, a very futuristic scene is about to take place between one man and one machine.
0:30.3	The man is a sandy-haired researcher.
0:33.0	He's sitting in front of a boxy 90s computer.
0:35.9	And the machine is a robot. He's a round metal cylinder
0:39.9	about the height of an eight-year-old. His name is Xavier.
0:42.7	Hello, I'm Xavier. Shall I purchase a cup of coffee for you?
0:47.3	It's a little bit hard to hear because the audio is old, but Xavier says, shall I purchase a cup of coffee?
0:53.3	Yes, please.
0:55.0	All right, please wait for a way.
0:59.0	Xavier's got his order, he pivots, and wheels out the door.
1:07.0	So Xavier's mission is to purchase a cup of coffee, but in order to do that, he has to do
1:13.5	a really human thing, which is identify a line of human beings waiting to purchase coffee
1:19.9	and get in that line.
1:21.2	So can a robot actually do that?
1:23.7	That's what this grainy video from 1999 is trying to show us.
1:30.6	And so the camera cuts to a coffee stand.
1:33.1	It's in the lobby of a university building.
1:37.2	Xavier wheels in at a leisurely half a mile an hour.
1:38.5	And he spots it.
	...

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