Tweenbots - A social experiment of cute autonomous robots and crowdsourced help | Hacker News Reader

Tweenbots - A social experiment of cute autonomous robots and crowdsourced help

tweenbots.com

50 pointsfrisco19 comments

Wonder if the results would've been different if the robot had a frown or mean face.

Or if the robots weren't anthropomorphic -- just a box with wheels.

Reminds me of this game I used to play called Creatures - a sort of life sim with monkey-like animals that you were supposed to nurture, teach, protect. There were a few people, though, who played the game by 'torturing' the 'animals', slapping them constantly, starving them, and drowning them. They had sites detailing their creatures' little misadventures.

This caused a lot of people to get up in arms, complaining about cruelty to animals and whatnot. I mean, these people were -pissed-. It was very strange to me, considering that they were a bunch of electric signals in a machine and had no personal wills. It must have been because they were cute - if they'd looked like starfish, nobody would have cared.

These are trained professionals operating in New York City.

Don't try this in Boston, kids!

Seriously.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare)

And check out the brilliantly Dada-ist press conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XTuiyJNJOI&feature=relat...

Terrorists don't think to put big smiles on bombs.

That's the only thing that's keeping us safe.

Actually, I'd love to see the difference in reactions in Boston and other cities around the world/US.

I invited her to Chicago.

Very cool but the first thought that came to my mind when I saw the video was: 'it's amazing that a bomb squad wasn't called in.'

There is hope!

At first glance I thought these were somehow controlled by Twitter. Has Twitter monopolized all words starting with Tw?

Is it just me, or does anybody else find it hard to make sense of phrases like:

> create a narrative about our relationship to space

She wants to make people pause and make sense of this little robot traversing washington square park--not something that happens everyday. By doing this, she has a lens into how people would interact with something (not necessarily human) in familiar spaces.

Thus, narrative about our relationship to space.

But does it really tell anything about the "relationship to space", or does it instead help us understand the "relationship to anthropomorphized robots". Without rigorously testing the robots in different contexts, it's pretty difficult to see what this says about "spaces" generally.

Also, the writing of this website is excessively jargon-y, and reads like business (or perhaps the worst kind of academic) babble:

> The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. <

I see a lot of that kind of writing: it's taught quite consistently to fine arts students, where it does actually have a use in persuading funding bodies to give money. If you say to a funding body "We want to look at the relationship between human beings and anthropomorphic robots!" you get nothing, but if you say "We want to look at the relationship between place and space and internal subjectivity through [blah blah blah]" you get money to build cool robots and let them loose on the park.

The only flaw with the plan is that this kind of stuff leaks out of that confine and infects discourse outside of art funding bodies.

It would've been twice as cool if it could take voice instructions.

I think the initial hypothesis is that the robot would be destroyed, stolen or thrown away by someone, hence the cheap construction.

How cute!

wow, that actually made me shed a tear. A happy tear.

what was the robot made with?

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