In good company?
Most contributors to this volume believe that only technical matters stand between where we are now and a time when robots will be our Companions and teachers. Robots need to expand their domains of understanding, and if those domains should be emotional, well, that will be a technical matter as well. So while this volume expresses designers’ enthusiasm about robots as technical objects, it challenges us to see robots as something more, as evocative objects. What are we thinking about when we are thinking about robots? We are thinking about aliveness and authenticity, love and spirituality. We are thinking about what it means to build a psychology. We are thinking about what makes people special. Or perhaps that they are not so special after all.
