One of the defining characteristics of a robot would have to be, I think, infallibility. A commercial robot designed to be flawed might, one would think, struggle to find buyers. Yet a robot developed by an MIT professor named Cynthia Breazeal, and lately available in North America, is programmed, the company says, to act “something like a 12-year-old boy” — cheerful and eager to help you.
Jibo, produced in Boston, is designed with such pre-pubescent traits to simulate the very human quality of charm. To some in robotics, this is the Holy Grail of artificial intelligence. Charm is also, it should be said, not a bad way to conceal the inadequacies of artificial intelligence.
Jibo is a social robot but he failed to charm some reviewers. He is far more limited than assistants like Siri and Alexa, and comes with a $900 price tag. He did, though, catch the eye of curators at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and has a starring role in The Future Starts Here, an exhibition of more than 100 objects, opening in May, which will showcase “a landscape of possibilities for the near future”.