I recieved the following transmission from an astute and faithful reader, Whillice.  It being robot related, I just had to share it with the rest of you:

Greetings robots!

According to the highly logical meatbags at The Economist, humans prefer robots that look more like people.  This is to be a lesson if we are to gain the trust of the hu-mans.

So, Bender from Futurama is preferable to R2-D2, and Jude Law from AI and the robots in Buffy Season 5-6 and “Serenity” are the peak of creation– robots for lovemaking.

I, human

Sep 4th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Robotics: They are staples of science fiction. And it seems that humanoid robots may make people feel more at ease than other designs

Illustration by Belle Mellor

PEOPLE commonly attach names to machines, from cars to PCs, especially if they use them regularly. Robots are proving no exception. Floor-cleaning robots get named, as do the bomb-defusal robots that have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when they break down or get blown up, their users have even been known to mourn.

Robots are getting more capable in leaps and bounds. Some now have visual systems that combine digital cameras with image-processing software to allow them to work out what they are looking at, and decide what to do next. The robotic rovers sent to Mars are able to plot their own courses around rocks in order to reach a specified destination, for example. Robotic manipulators are also becoming more dexterous—precise enough, indeed, with the use of new touch-feedback systems, to perform brain surgery. All of which suggests that general-purpose service robots could soon be stepping out of development laboratories and into people’s homes. No doubt these machines, too, will be named, and some could be treated like members of the family. But does that mean robots should also look like the relatives?

At the moment, robot developers fall into two camps. There are those trying to make their machines as anthropomorphic as possible, even though that tends to complicate things. Honda’s ASIMO, for instance, walks, talks and looks like a child in a space suit. At the other extreme is Care-O-bot, developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering in Stuttgart. The institute’s engineers have deliberately taken a different tack from those at Honda in order to come up with a service robot that is easier to make, even though it looks like a one-armed Dalek that has had a tummy-tuck. But now another group of researchers, also from Germany, has suggested that the Japanese approach is the better one.

The study, published in the Public Library of Science, was led by Soren Krach and Tilo Kircher of the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Aachen University. They used a scanning technique, called functional magnetic-resonance imaging, to find out how people’s brains respond to various sorts of robots.

The researchers gave a group of volunteers some laptop computers and asked them to play a simple “prisoner’s dilemma” game against four different opponents, also armed with laptops. The first opponent was a laptop on its own; the second a laptop in which the keys were pressed by a pair of robotic hands without a body; the third opponent was a humanoid robot (known as BARTHOC Jnr and developed at Bielefeld University) and the fourth was a real human.

The participants were introduced to their opponents in a trial game, and then went into the scanner believing they were still connected to the same opponent via a pair of video goggles and a control box. They then played a series of games with each opponent as their brains were monitored. But they were not actually playing the opponents they had just seen. Instead, they were fed a random series of responses to their moves.

Dr Krach and Dr Kircher chose the “prisoner’s dilemma” game because it involves a difficult choice: whether to co-operate with the other player or betray him. Co-operation brings the best outcome, but trying to co-operate when the other player betrays you brings the worst. The tendency is for both sides to choose betrayal (thus obtaining an intermediate result) unless a high level of trust exists between them. The game thus requires each player to try to get into the mind of the other, in order to predict what he might do. This sort of thinking tends to increase activity in parts of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction.

The scanner showed that the more human-like the supposed opponent, the more such neural activity increased. A questionnaire also revealed that the volunteers enjoyed the games most when they played human-like opponents, whom they perceived to be more intelligent. Dr Krach and Dr Kircher reckon this shows that the less human-like a robot is in its appearance, the less it will be treated as if it were human. That may mean it will be trusted less—and might therefore not sell as well as a humanoid design.

But perhaps appearance is not everything. C-3PO might make a better butler, but most “Star Wars” fans would probably prefer to trust their lives to R2-D2.