Last week, Facebook announced it would hire 3,000 workers to monitor content streamed and posted on the vast social network. These legions of new staffers will augment the existing team members who keep an eye on the site, and they are expected to respond more quickly to requests to take down offensive postings than the site has been able to in the past. "If we're going to build a safe community, we need to respond quickly," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in (where else?) a Facebook post. "We're working to make these videos easier to report so we can take the right action sooner -- whether that's responding quickly when someone needs help or taking a post down." Think about that for a second.

The three-foot tall robot with "wide eyes, working fingers, pastel trimming, and a touchscreen tablet on its chest" showed off its babysitting skills at an annual robotics event in San Jose, California, the Guardian reported. The iPal is designed to act like a companion for children: the robot talks to them, answering general-knowledge questions like "Why is the sun hot?," and entertaining them with song, dance, and games, such as rock-paper-scissors. Jiping Wang, founder of Avatar Mind, which created the iPal, told the Guardian that the robot can keep children between the ages of 3 and 8 occupied for "a couple of hours" without adult supervision, touting it as a perfect solution to fill the time between when children return home from school and when parents get back from work. Madeline Duva, an adviser to Avatar Mind, clarified that "it cannot replace a babysitter." But, she said, in cases where you do need to occupy a child for a brief period while you, say, run to the store for some laundry detergent, the iPal is better than devices like the iPad, which are far less interactive than the robot.

The three-foot tall robot with "wide eyes, working fingers, pastel trimming, and a touchscreen tablet on its chest" showed off its babysitting skills at an annual robotics event in San Jose, California,…

Humanoid robots were out of fashion at this year's RoboBusiness, the annual exhibition in San Jose, California, that pegs itself as "the most important robotics event in the world". Make your robot look and sound too much like C3P0, explained Ty Jaegerson of Savioke, and people's "expectations of intelligence go up". The exception to the non-anthropomorphic, however, was the iPal, a child-size robot designed to take on distinctly adult responsibilities. The 3ft tall iPal has wide eyes, working fingers, pastel trimming, and a touchscreen tablet on its chest. It can sing, dance, and play rock paper scissors.