Aging Japan squeezes out another robot baby

The nightmare of robot babies continues apace in Japan, a rapidly aging society where human babies are going out of style. Babyloid is the latest cyber-tot to spring from the minds of engineers with little apparent regard for how scary their progeny are. Creator Masayoshi Kano of Nagoya's Chukyo University and Ifbot fame has been showing off Babyloid, developed two years ago, in presentations sponsored by the local government. He recently explained the robot in a talk at the Artificial Intelligence Research Promotion Foundation. Inspired by a baby beluga whale, Babyloid is designed to be a therapeutic robot for depressed seniors, similar to Takanori Shibata's robot seal Paro.