Robot makes you empathetic…maybe.
A day in the life of a Baby developer
Hi!
It’s nice to be back on the land of liberty (for our founder Taka-san it has been only been a month, but for me personally, it has been several years since I was there:))
Coming from a cozy environment of Tokyo, San Francisco, for what it’s worth, seems utterly brutal — brutal in a sense that the rich are brutally rich, and the poor are brutally poor. The difference is in your face crystal clear, and it is, for someone like myself (an outsider who is not used to seeing so much social stratification at work,) painful to observe. It is especially heart breaking to see, as a young woman, a young homeless girl sleeping on the street wrapped around old rugs and not much else.
What, as a Baby robot developer, can do about it?
It seemed that what we do is not directly related to this ongoing social stratification. Baby robot is great, it is a social experiment (as Taka-san discussed in his earlier post) indeed, and it will change the way we interact with robot and humans alike. Having witnessed this dire situation unfolding itself in front of my eyes, though, I cannot help but wonder if there is anything we can do about it.
Of course, there is no direct and immediate way we can get involved to make a dramatic change in this situation we are witnessing right now. There are plenty of public as well as private entities engaged in helping homeless people and doing their best. This is a kind of a problem with so many facets, factors, and potential solutions to it, and there really isn’t a single approach to address this, and I’m sure entities like that are of course more suitable to take a more holistic, fundamental approach than I could possibly take.
I believe, though, what we do would be able to offer a glimpse of hope in one of the aspects of such issue — at the risk of sounding like an old record (hey young folks out there, there were times where we used a record to play music) but the name of the game is empathy.
What we need is having a small talk with people we think we do not have anything in common.
What we need is securing a little more down time with your loved ones and listening to their stories.
What we need is not grimacing at the smell of homeless person when he passes by us, but instead, stopping for once second and think that he may be a retired veteran whose family used to look up to him.
Empathy starts with a small, trivial change in belief.
Baby is a social robot, waiting the very day it can jump out of box and land on your hand. It wants you to take it anywhere, and it want to see you sharing your Baby with others. Baby is an robot that you feed with your empathy, and it gives you empathy back. Nothing much more, but it is a powerful communication device.
I’m not here to make a grand claim that our product will make people more empathetic and hence help resolve the situation. However, if people can stretch empathy and love to a Baby robot, then there is no reason we can’t to other human beings.
Let us believe in what we believe in, and let us keep on developing the world’s weakest, most lovable robot that the world has never seen.
This might be a wishful thinking, but I think Baby can reap a seed of empathy in all of our hearts, albeit a very, very tiny seed— small Baby step at a time, right?
Until next time, stay warm:)
Yuki
