There is a positive quality about this story that encourages my belief that our technologies are not nearly as dehumanising as some would like us to believe. via tweenbots | kacie kinzer.

In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

The results were unexpected. ... Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged.

[...] But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining its destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

Our technologies have made the vastest spaces smaller, from aircraft that deliver us to friends and family and new experiences around the world to Mars landers that bring another planet into our living rooms to the internet that increasingly provides us with serendipitous connections with new ideas, people and their thoughts.

On balance, how do you see the role of technology, especially IT, in changing the quality of your life, and in what direction?

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