Reddit mentions of The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives

Building on what you've said, runvnc, I want to add that people have an enduring but likely incorrect idea that humans will reject robots with the artful appearance of human-like intelligence and emotion, let alone the supposedly genuine intelligence and emotions speculated about in character-types like Kara here. Humans have loved artificial objects on much, much less humanization than this character.

MIT already studies robot/human interaction, and their research finds that people almost compulsively personify their robots as having human feelings and characteristics, and from there, they give them names, hats, and clothes. (It's not unlike how we interact with our pets honestly.) Elderly people living with prototype robot caretakers consider the robots their friends---when they don't have anywhere near this level of humanized features. (This book here details some more of these and other studies if anyone's interested.)

From there, I'm gonna argue that this video is an unintentional demonstration of that compulsion to personify. People would be much more uncomfortable if she really had no emotion or humanity. A robot who shows this level of human-like emotion but does not resist deconstruction would be much more strange and surreal. Kara appears human because we're more comfortable with that.

TL;DR: Robots aren't going to be oppressed for being 'too human'. People are going to love their robots like they love their dogs.

> I'm starting to think sound and/or image processing will come out on top though.

Oddly, that is what my day job is too. DSP for vibrational analysis, just no imaging or AI.

ML = machine learning, yes.

I based my ideas on original research done by Rosalind Picard at the MIT Media Lab. Her work was covered in a few pages in the book The Sorcerer's and their Apprentices, where they discuss later versions of the original device. My plan is to take this basic idea and roll it into a usable product, based on Android OS.

I'd been blogging about this for a few years, but nobody ever seemed interested. I'm currently thinking about going public with my project via an alternative route: a podcast for people on the autism spectrum where we discuss the fun parts about who we are, our special interests, etc. I'm in the pre-production stage and plan to have this out within a few months, and I'll post the info on it to Reddit when it's live.