A robot has been developed in Japan that can be seen here – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7946780.stm

I would really like to see this in the flesh as it were (or whatever it’s made of) because I found my reaction to watching the video clip interesting. Before the curtain was unveiled I had images of a sort of terminator type robot that could obviously be sent into burning buildings to rescue people, or into dangerous mines or whatever. But would you want any harm to come to something as cute as this?

Creating a robot with facial expressions and human features (the bosom for example) made me think about robots in a very different way. And there was this sense of watching this and realising that many of the issues raised by science fiction writers could be realised. How would we interact with ‘human like’ robots and what would our emotional response be.

It feels like this robot is designed to be human like to create human responses within us. Could I talk to it? What sort of conversation might it have?

I got the sense that the robot is designed to have a social function as much as being the answer to some technical or other problem, and that’s complex; can we have ethical issues with a lump of metal and silicon chips and electronic circuits. No; because that’s all it is. But if it creates an emotional response within us, then the relationship between robots and humans is going to be very different to that between humans and other technologies.