The New York Times What Do You Mean, 'It's Just Like a Real Dog'?
[requires 'free' registration]
"What do children think about what it means to be alive? And at what ages can children distinguish mechanical objects from real animals or people? Research into these questions is still in its earliest stages. There was a flurry of interest in children's reactions when Tamagotchis, virtual pets from Japan, first appeared a few years ago and then started dying on their young owners. But the topic is attracting more attention now as seemingly intelligent toys and other robots appear on the market in increasing variety and numbers. "

"Again and again... researchers have asked the children: ''Is it alive? Is it like a real pet? Does it know you?''

"Strikingly," Ms. Audley said, "often the answer they settled on was, 'It's not alive in a human or animal kind of way, but in a Furby kind of way.' "

redux [04.21.00]
The Third Culture A new kind of object: From Rorschach to Relationship
"I have studied the effects of computational objects on human developmental psychology for over twenty years, documenting the ways that computation and its metaphors have influenced our thinking about such matters as how the mind works, what it means to be intelligent, and what is special about being human. Now, I believe that a new kind of computational object — the relational artifact — is provoking striking new changes in the narrative of human development, especially in the way people think about life, and about what kind of relationships it is appropriate to have with a machine. Relational artifacts are computational objects designed to recognize and respond to the affective states of human beings–and indeed, to present themselves as having "affective" states of their own. They include children's playthings (such as Furbies and Tamagotchis), digital dolls that double as health monitoring systems for the homebound elderly (Matsushita's forthcoming Tama), sentient robots whose knowledge and personalities change through their interactions with humans, as well as software that responds to its users’ emotional states and responds with "emotional states" of their own."

"By accepting a new category of relationship, with entities that they recognize as "sort-of-alive", or "alive in a different, but legitimate way," today's children will redefine the scope and shape of the playing field for social relations in the future."

The Freedom Forum Ananova's virtual-newscast debut: We'll wait for 2.0
"The British creators of Ananova, the world’s first virtual newscaster, say she will revolutionize the way all of us get our news."

"Cybercaster Ananova’s first words, on April 19, were interesting enough: “Hello, world. Here is the news — and this time it’s personal.”"

"I found that I didn’t object to the idea of you, [Ananova], — the idea of a computer reading me the news — probably in the same way that people did not object a generation ago to Reuters' bringing them stock quotes on a special desktop machine. That machine was clunky, too. But it got better. Much better. And so, I believe, will you."

George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."