The Rise Of Anthropomorphic Gadgets

Weaving through the crowds of the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, visitors encountered friendly-looking robots that played chess, swayed and played guitar, and offered help with all manner of domestic tasks. During a trade show dominated by AI's integration in everything from home appliances to self-driving cars, virtual assistants seemed omnipresent, often taking the form of knee-high robots that roamed the convention floor, innocently blinking up at onlookers or shouting greetings from their exhibitor booths. These robots are still far from the humanoid domestic servants often imagined in science fiction movies, but everything about them--their silhouettes, movements, and conversational tone--is meant to relieve some of the friction that people may feel introducing this level of technology into their houses. This user-friendly anthropomorphism wasn't just relegated to robots at CES. Toyota's much-hyped autonomous concept car, the Concept-i, was billed as "Less of a ...