Best Pleo video yet

Yet another article on the forthcoming baby dinosaur robot, this one has a good five-minute video without any monologue, just an example round of playing with a Pleo: waking him up, poking at him playfully, inducing him to peer over the edge of a table, then picking him up until he goes back to sleep. The user in the video is the inventor. The three-page article is interesting too, giving background on the Idahoan inventor, who use to be a mime before creating the consumer-sensation Furby (which looks almost as annoying as those singing-and-dancing snowmen advertised during the holidays) and earning himself $10 million.

To be released in March at $250, the Pleo seems an unlikely purchase for us, but it sure is tempting. I'm just fascinated by the fact that we are at the cusp of the age of robots, and this will go down as one of the first mass-market attempts at a life-like robot. But then I am not sure if I want the kids to be around a robot pet just yet. Would it be fun for more than a week, then become a very expensive toy mistake? At the other extreme, would Elias get so emotionally attached to it that he'd cry when it breaks? What if he breaks it himself, will he be devastated? And is it just wrong to love a robot -- or is it good to develop a sense of both what a robot is and isn't? And isn't having pets and toys which need gentle care while they are alive/functioning a good part of life? Et cetera.

For my own part, I want to know more about the AI ware to get a good idea of how complex and therefore interesting this thing really is. Sounds like it is programmable to some extent (or maybe you can't write scripts, as you can for Lego bots, you can just set the Pleo's personality parameters), but there's not much it can physically do besides sleep, purr, wiggle, walk, and respond to pokes and pets. Hmm, sounds like a cat, minus the barf and litterbox ... that's starting to sound like a pretty good investment. Maybe this should be the marketing line: It's cheaper than a year of cat food.

UPDATE: Bill Gates compares, in five pages, the robotics industry today to the software industry of 30 years ago. Carr takes a quick glance.

Gates confirms something for me: the biggest challenges in robotics are software problems. But I'm skeptical of his suggestion that robotics is especially in need of multi-threaded software. His example of a robot too busy adjusting its drive motor to notice an imminent cliff is silly -- even Office bloatware is rarely that unresponsive -- and his praise for Microsoft's "concurrency and coordination runtime" just sounds like an ad to me. (Microsoft is obviously playing catch-up in robotics to other software giants ... like Lego.) If we've learned anything in software, it's that task switching on a Von Neuman architecture is a really, really good way to achieve virtual simultaneity. Moderately complex multithreaded programs are not just "difficult" to write, they're just shy of impossible for humans to get bug-free.