Why people become strangely attached to their robot vacuum cleaners

So, what do you do?

I’m a researcher at MIT, where I study human-machine interaction from a social, legal and ethical perspective.

When humans interact with machines like robots, they often seem to develop an emotional connection. Why?

We are very social creatures and we tend to subconsciously treat robots like they are alive, even though we know they are just machines. Part of this comes from our tendency to anthropomorphise, i.e. to project human traits, motivations and behaviours onto non-humans, like our pets. We do this in order to make sense of the world around us. Robots move…