I stumbled across this site quite accidentally. It’s about an experiment with cute little robots that are fairly helpless and seeing what happened when they relied on the kindness of strangers to get where they were supposed to go.
The creator of the experiment made the robots as cheaply as possible — expecting them to meet their doom in the cruel, cruel world — but was pleased to find that even in New York city there were strangers who were willing to help a little defenseless robot.
You can learn more about the Tweenbots here.
I do wonder about the lessons to take from this experiment.
On the cute side, there are plenty of people walking around New York city that I’d be afraid to help due to their distinctly scary look.
On the scary side, it’s kinda crazy how a terrorist could fill a cute robot with anthrax or some explosive and then rely on strangers to help the robot reach it’s target — even in a place like New York city that is now filled with signs telling people to report anything suspicious (like we’re living in Nineteen Eighty-Four
Quote from A Streetcar Named Desire
