I’ve always found  robots to be a lot of fun and neat.  Tales of robots becoming intelligent and even becoming our peers are fascinating to me.  It was really neat to hear of a test done with children and robots that showed a social and emotional attachment.Read More Below...

The robot was a Quiro  from Sony.  It was canceled by Sony but there are a bunch of them ‘in the wild’.  Children aged 10 months to 2 years were allowed to interact with the robot 45 times over the course of 5 months.  By the end of the study the robot had turned from just a toy to something more.  Children would tell it night night and bring it a blanket.  If it fell they would  try to help it up.  In the beginning they would put their hands all over the robot but they gradually only would touch it on the robot’s hands and arms much like people do with each other.

While the robot and children were supervised this put in the groundwork for unsupervised and extended interaction between children robots.  Someday soon the nanny bot and others will come into  our daily lives and one day we may even visit the question of our own soul as robots become more human.

I found this through robotliving.com  and there is more info at the guardian and NewScientist. Bonus points for the person who can name the literary reference in the title