Although he may look like something out of Geppetto’s workshop, Zeno is actually the creation of roboticist Dave Hanson. Hanson recognizes that the robopocalypse is nearing, and he has intentionally made Zeno a non-evil bot. Zeno laughs and smiles and is damn cheerful. Complete with button nose and an imaginative back story about coming here from the future, Zeno is nothing like the steely clockwork oppressors we’ve come to picture in our nightmares.
Though the computer inside Zeno is relatively run-of-the-mill, Zeno is not—with the ability to communicate wirelessly with servers and PCs all over the interwebs, he has access to all the information there is. And Zeno can be aware of you by learning your name and face and getting to know you; he seems really quite friendly. Dave Hanson’s Zeno is just a prototype for what he wants to create in the long term, “friendly superintelligent” robots.
“The idea is to create a cultural phenomenon and accelerate the use and humanization of the technology…Robots have gotten steadily more capable but humans’ expectations that robots should have minds keeps biting robot developers.”
Well, hopefully the time when robot intelligence meets/exceeds human intelligence is not far off—that is, only if the robots of the future are as nice as Zeno appears. I’m not sure, but the longer I look at Zeno, the more I think there’s something faintly sinister about him. A kind of Chucky-esque aloofness in his eyes.

[Wired]

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under General, Research, Toys. Be sure to subscribe to the Botropolis.com feed because it is really, really awesome. Have something you want to share? Please let us know.

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