Manuela Veloso on empathy for robots
Manuela Veloso is an AI and robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who did a lot of work with soccer-playing robots.
I often see people who look at my soccer-playing Sony dog robots being literally moved by those little machines. When I am giving a big technical explanation, saying that the robot is a mechanical thing in which you can switch the legs, press a button, and put another leg on, I see this panic in the eyes of my audience like, “You are hurting the dog!” I say, “I’m sorry, this is a robot.”
This excerpt comes from the panel discussion at the end of Don Knuth’s Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.
