The Nao Bot.

He is this cool robot that arrived a few weeks ago and became the class mascot.
This little guy cost about $13,000 dollars. It is good that my tuition actually goes into something meaningful.

I am part of the robotics team that Ricardo host ever Friday with the goal of teaching people, mostly young people but can be applied to anyone, how to program and if a robot can generate a new idea to people by changing simple things to specific event.
For example, if  there is a standard restaurant and the robot moves the table in a specific way, without saying anything, the human has to generate a new meaning in the new placement of the table. Lastly the general interaction of humans with artificial robots.

In this particular session when the photo is taken, the robot went in a loop and had to perform a hard rest, essentially equivalently to killing and reviving the robot.

But when the reset was performed, there was an interesting side effect. I felt bad for the robot. I know it is not living, therefore a reset is necessary, but there was a sharp pain of guilt as it felt we were killing a robot.

This is interesting because i am putting affinity of living into a non-living object and it makes me wonder if it that is correct or incorrect.

All these feelings will become relevant in a not to distant future when robotics is advanced to maybe enter our house?

Are they treated as a pet? As a living person? As a servant? Have we  gone to far as humans in creating something seeming to be godlike, creating something in our likeness?

I feel like I know where i stand. Do you?

Franz