I recently came across the photo of Tinius the Turtle robot being “walked” at Rice University in 1950, and how cute! So far most psychological tests indicate humans are averse to harming robots, but I’m not buying it. Considering the things we do to one another and the atrocities we reign down on chickens and pigs and cows, it’s only a matter of time before restraint is relaxed and hands ungloved. There’ll be AI petting zoos, but there also be an industry of lifelike machines built to take a punch, or a bullet. There’s just something about us. We compartmentalize. From Alex Hern’s Guardian article about robopets and torture, which centers around DAR-1. An excerpt:

DAR–1 is the creation of roboticist Ray Renteria, who introduces himself to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, as an amateur magician. And just as the work of a magician is focused around misdirection, and a control of the context in which magic is performed, so too is DAR–1 an exercise in how simple, mechanistic effects can be imbued with life with just the right presentation.

The work starts in Renteria’s blurb for DAR–1, a part of the festival’s “Robot Petting Zoo”. The Raspberry Pi and laser-cut legs (both, incidentally, produced in England, leading Renteria to describe the machine as a “British invader”) aren’t mentioned. Instead, visitors are primed to treat the robot as a fellow living being from the off.

“Curious about people, he’ll study your eyes and your smile with the intensity of a focused child,” it reads. “He’s shy, though. If you get a little too close to him, he’ll get nervous and try to back away. See how long you get him to keep following your eyes by looking deep into his.” Similarly, if you ask Renteria why the robot has a permanent shiver to its movements, there’s a technical answer – a particular variable hovering between fully-on and fully-off leads to motors being rapidly engaged then disengaged – but also an anthropomorphised one: “he’s nervous”.

At the same time, says Renteria, “he’s a robot, he’s proud of being a robot, so you’re not going to talk to him, you’re not going to call to him to try to get his attention.”•