The Roomba Guy's Second Act: A Robot You'll Want to Snuggle

I sincerely laughed out loud when I saw the screenshot of the "Artificial Life Cognitive Platform":

  Cognitive Stack

  System 3 - Long Term Drives
  I love being petted.

  System 2 - Emotionally-Aware Reasoning
  Goal: Receive pets.

  IWM - Internal World Model
  Guardian in view (right, moderate distance). Being petted.

  My Guardian is paying attention to me. My Guardian is reaching a hand toward me.

What childish people. What a sordid vision of "cognition" these chuds have. One of my boy cats looooovvveess getting kisses, even though it obviously annoys him a little, it's not as utilitarian as petting with a hand, and he cleans off my stinky human germs afterwards. It's because I love him and he knows it, and he loves it when I show him affection. Good luck writing a prompt that conveys that adequately to your LLM-robot.

And considering how much I love my cats because of how little they care if I'm busy, this just seems cynical bordering on evil:

  Jones describes two scenarios for when a Familiar’s owner comes home: In the first, the person bends down with arms wide open, ready for a hug. In the second, the person is rushed, with an armload of groceries, no time for robo-snuggles. The Familiar will know whether to run up or to hang back.

I hope nobody involved with this has actual pets:

  Is a person happy or sad? Are they having an argument? When does a sad person want comfort... or solitude? The Familiar must be programmed to handle these scenarios, like an autonomous vehicle is programmed to handle tricky intersections.
  All of a Familiar’s behaviors are intended to be approachable and inoffensive, says Morgan Pope, a Familiar Machines roboticist who spent almost eight years at Disney Research. Some of the ways the robot moves are based on the moves of dogs and other animals: how close it comes to a person, the speed at which it approaches, even the way it bats its eyes and twitches its ears.
  Training a robot on the intricate timing of initiating interaction with a new person is an "enormously hard" problem, says Pope.

Maybe it's not "enormously hard." Maybe it's "should never be solved." Humans are not meant to have totally one-sided interactions with beings who only want to please us. You have to actually be friendly and nice to dogs and cats, pretend to be interested in what they're interested in, just like with other humans.