There’s nothing wrong with hooking up a robot with a Facebook (
) account. IRC channels have had ELISA-style bots who have answered your questions in a seemingly intelligent manner for decades. Plants are tweeting, asking for more sunlight and water; babies are sending messages from the womb.
However, the high tone and far-reaching assumptions of the BBC article, discussing how Dr Nikolaus Mavridis will give his robot a Facebook page, make for a particularly funny read.
First, it says that the good doctor and co-researchers are doing this because they want to “look into ways of overcoming the reluctance of people to stay in touch with robots.”
Well, this may come as a surprise, but I’ve been reluctant to stay in touch with robots for several reasons other than the lack of their Facebook profile. First, there aren’t that many of them; and those that do exist aren’t really all that intelligent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge science fiction fan and have a keen interest in robotics and AI, but however you feel about the subject it’s a bit too early to “stay in touch” with robots.
The article also says that embedding the robot in a social web - Facebook, that is - will “give rise to a sustainable friendship can grow up between man and machine.” Erm, nope. It’s a fun stunt to raise some awareness about the project, and it’s cool for Facebook to have a robot among its 200 million users, but it will not give rise to friendship between man and machine; just like those IRC bots haven’t really improved human-robotic relationships over the years. Maybe the fact that we’re mostly ignoring robots as far as social activities go will come back and haunt us in some Matrix-like fashion, but I’ll take my chances and skip this particular Facebook friend.
