pimg src=”http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/03/340x_roombacat.jpg” class=”left image340″ width=”340″ /A new study shows that people emotionally bond with their Roombas, giving names and arbitrary genders to their robotic vacuum cleaners. And gee whiz, they can’t even sleep with ithese/i robots!/p
pThe study, done by Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, showed that 21 of 30 studied Roomba owners gave their bots names, while 16 referred to it as a “he.” People also like to help out the Roomba, pre-cleaning for it and even buying new rugs for it to clean up./p
pThe fact that people are anthropomorphizing Roombas, robots that look absolutely nothing like a person, should bode well for the inevitable robots that are actually designed to look like people. On the other hand, it may be that the Roomba’s total other-ness is what makes people OK with becoming attached to them. They’re just cute little vacuum cleaners, not big, latex-covered biped robots trying to have a conversation with you. But someday! [a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21102202/"MSNBC/a]/pbr clear=”both” style=”clear: both;”/
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