Alone together with man’s new best friend | NPR Technology Podcast

In the latest (March 20th) episode of NPR’s Technology Podcast, the first two segments are devoted to addressing the questions “Are We Plugged-In, Connected, But Alone?” and “Will Man’s Best Friend Be A Robot?”

For the first of these questions, an interview with MIT Professor Sherry Turkle is woven together with snippets from her Feb 2012 TED Talk, “Connected, but alone?” Prof. Turkle tells the story of watching an elderly woman interacting with a Paro Therapeutic Robot and how profoundly that experience affected her.

In the second segment, an interview with MIT Professor Cynthia Breazeal is interwoven with her own Dec 2010 TED Talk (TEDWomen), “The rise of personal robots”, in which she describes her work developing robots that interact with people using non-verbal cues.

John Payne

John Payne