

Tweenbots - A social experiment of cute autonomous robots and crowdsourced help - frisco
http://www.tweenbots.com/

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

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

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noonespecial
These are trained professionals operating in New York City.

Don't try this in Boston, kids!

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

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brandnewlow
I invited her to Chicago.

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nickb
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!

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

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jcromartie
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

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jamesjyu
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.

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jacobolus
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._ <

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tommorris
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.

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

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

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barredo
How cute!

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

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pclark
what was the robot made with?

