Why are we obsessed with making them human? Make them cute little teddy bears or something. I'd much prefer that to an uncanny valley human robot

Dogs aren’t human either. A robot would be fine for me. How about a robot dog ? Just have to recharge and no shedding , no pooper scooping .

AI (and bots) pretending to be human should be illegal and criminally charged in the whole world. Who in the world would like to be mislead and lied to?!

I'd like to see opinions before, and after, using a companion robot, or with today's technology a companion chatbot. How do people feel after chatting with a chatbot? How do they feel if abilities of the chatbot are taken away? Do they change how they view bots after using them, and if so do those views become more positive or more negative?

As we've seen with other forms of technology or entertainment the opinion changes with more use. Video games and comic books had major detractors, but are now completely accepted. Will bots experience the same change in public opinion with use? We're not going to have a choice, even with current missteps we're only going to see more bots with more features as time marches on.

What an insanely bizarre bit of “social science.” This research obviously did not include a robot-forward thinking society like Japan, haha. They’re literally already using robot companions for elderly care and companionship.

Also the first and second questions have wildly different meanings and are barely even related. Who on earth is suggesting we lie to old people that their robots are human? I don’t think people like being lied to about most things, why would they be comfortable being robo-catfished?

Artificial companion robots can be robo-dog, cat, BB8 droid, baby Yoda, literally unlimited non-human options.

So far the other comments are (for some bizarre reason) pretending robots can actually mimic the experience of companionship by another human. That is simply untrue. There's an untold number of factors that influence hormone releases constituting social bonding, and robots meet none of the necessary qualifications. So far, other commenters have simply been using this post as a vehicle for their detestable ageism and sexism (no better than racism and homophobia, both of which I experience on a near-daily basis [sexism too, but not ageism all the time]), and that's not only abusive to human beings but it's entirely unscientific in nature.

The better way to address this problem would be doing away with the godawful nursing home culture of North America. For most of human history, families have lived together multigenerationally and they still do in the majority of the world. Extracting and isolating old people is just cruel.

I would NOT want an "Artificial Companion robot"

I might want a useful assistant

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Seems to me like if you can make it look realistically human where someone can't readily tell, you are taking the boring route and doing them a disservice by not telling them.

First off, if I know they aren't human, no reason to be embarrassed about the state of my apartment, or to feel guilty about having them cook and clean and basically do all the work around the place.

And if they can be realistically human, they could also be Klingon, an elf, a catgirl, a giant anthropomorphic bunny, or whatever I wanted, and this would undoubtedly be more entertaining...

To me even if I was told it was AI beforehand I feel like having something to talk to that can't reciprocate would help comfort me, like talking to a pet.

However if I thought they were an actual human and I shared things about myself and formed a bond with them only to find out they are an AI would make me feel much worse. This is of course anecdotal, though.

You want M3GAN? This is how you get M3GAN

Hope we expect to respond and how we respond are two very different things.

I've been shocked and surprised by how easy it is to project agency onto chatgpt. I suspect I would adapt very easily to a bot companion.

That movie Her captures it. Bonus points when the bot is voiced by Scarlett Johansson!

Boomers reject technology, more on this bombshell story at 10.

What a useless study. 65% female, 95% white, 64 year old median age, 70% married, 75% college educated, 62% with pets. The title could easily be, “Old, white, educated, married, cat ladies, who think they are computer literate, are afraid of companion robots.”