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Isn’t that strange though? In reality all he did is push something equal to a toaster, but because it displayed human characteristics we felt sympathy. That is some scary stuff because I assume as the decades move on they will create robots more and more human like until it will be impossible to tell the difference, and they advance fast don’t they. I look at video games today, they could pass for real life videos when only 20 years ago Pac man seemed to be the height of computer video technology. So imagine 20 years from now, you are at a party, the guest offers you a drink and you are saying hello to everyone and this gorgeous woman comes up and says hello, and you get to talking and you ask her “What do you do for a living” and she tells you “Oh I’m sorry, I’m an artificial person. I was only created 2 days ago”. This where we are heading.

I was reading something the other day talking about some the issues folks have with cgi. It seems that when the cgi is somewhat lifelike, people will feel sympathy for the characters, however as it gets really close to being real , but not quite there we actually have the opposite reactions. One thing that is still not quite there with computer animation are faces. Faces are the first thing we learn to recognise as infants, and if it is just slightly off, people will reject the simulation. Same goes for body movements. I'm sure you have notices how even in really good cgi, movement doesnt look natural. It tends to be too smooth , and so is not quite like normal human motion. I think in this case, because the robot was human-like, but obviously robotic, it evoked that sympathy response. The psychology of this stuff is actually fairly interesting IMO.