Sometimes We Feel More Comfortable Talking To A Robot
Artist Alexander Reben wants to know whether a robot could fulfill our deep need for companionship. He created a robot named BlabDroid that asks people to share their raw emotions and deep secrets.
We spend a lot of time talking to Alexa and Siri. Imagine if such artificial personalities were put inside a cute, adorable robot. That's what Alexander Reben has done. The artist created what he saw as the perfect interview machine to see how much he could get people to reveal to the robot.
Reben's experiments with human robot interactions began when he was working on his Ph.D. in robotics at MIT. He built a robot called Boxie. It was made of cardboard, about the size of a microwave oven, and rolled around like a toy tank.
If you walked into the lab at MIT, Boxie would approach with its big, round black eyes wide open and ask you for
