This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Have you ever talked to your computer, cursed it for making a mistake?
PC load letter.
What the does that mean?
Have you ever argued with the traffic directions you get from Google Maps or.
Waze starting route to Grover's Mill Road, head north on.
Have you ever looked at a roomba cleaning the floor on the other side of the room and told it, please come over to this side, turn left.
It just ran itself right over the edge.
Robots and artificial intelligence are playing an ever larger role in all of our lives.
Of course, this is not the role that science fiction once imagined.
It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear.
Robots bent on our destruction remain the stuff of movies like Terminator and robot sentience is still an idea that's far off in the future.
But there's a lot we're learning about smart machines, and there's a lot that smart machines are teaching us about how we connect with the world around us and with each other.
This week on hidden brain.
Can robots teach us what it means to be human?
My guest today has spent a lot of time thinking about how we interact with smart machines and how those interactions might change the way we relate to one another.
Kate Darling is a research specialist at the MIT Media Lab.
She joined us recently in front of a live audience at the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, as part of the Aspen Ideas festival.
Also on stage was a robot, a green robot dinosaur about the size of a small dog known as a pleo.