Robots have been the topic of the day. This morning, Chris Fahey asked on Twitter, “Would making robocalls illegal violate the First Amendment? We have to start thinking about legislating human-robot interactions like these.”  I replied with a link to the following video which asks, “What happened to the human voice?”

In this article from the New York Times, Hiroko Tabuchi talks about how he and David Guttenfelder spent a year chronicling Japan’s robot obsession. There are great photos, like the one above, but I particularly like this:

One of the only commercially successful consumer robots so far is made by an American company, iRobot: the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. However, the Japanese don’t want a Roomba, a scientist told us, they want companions like Paro, the robotic seal, designed to comfort the elderly.

I find “robocalls” a bit disturbing, but would I feel the same if I was being cared for? On the phone it feels cold and distant, but if a robot was directly meeting my needs would I have appreciation for it or even have admiration for it?