I, Nanny...

Yesterday I wrote about Ergo Proxy, an anime I had recently finished watching. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans live in bio-domes, are cloned in artificial wombs, and depend on artificial intelligent machines (androids) for many basic, day-to-day functions. Well it turns out that at least one part of that story might not be so sci-fi after all. In a Wired article, I just discovered that robot nannies are now available.

Models now on the market range from the Hello Kitty robot — "perfect ... for whoever does not have a lot time to stay with child," proclaims a vendor — to NEC's PaPeRo, which tells jokes, gives quizzes and uses radio-frequency identification chips to track kids. In another generation, these sophisticated machines will likely seem quaint.

Personal service robots are more common than industrial robots — an estimated 5.8 million are now in use, five times more than in industry — and people are happy to use them for tasks once fulfilled by people. One survey of public attitude towards robots found that many people were willing to to use them as babysitters — more people, in fact, than would use robots as priests or massage therapists.

Of course, while the technology is definitely cool, it does raise a lot of interesting ethical questions we'll eventually have to tackle as robots get more advanced and more prevalent in our daily lives. Man, these are crazy times we live in.