"No friend had ever sworn their loyalty so convincingly, but two black holes bring her back down to earth. Though not entirely." (Celia, The Vestigial Heart)
about situations appearing in the chapters 9-12 of the novel "The Vestigial Heart":
2.A - How does robot appearance influence public acceptance?
2.B - What are the advantages and dangers of robots simulating emotions?
2.C - Have you heard of/experienced the “uncanny valley” effect?
2.D - Should emotional attachment to robots be encouraged?
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Bryson J.J. (2010) Robots should be slaves. In Wilks Y. (Ed.) Close Engagements with Artificial Companions: Key social, psychological, ethical and design issues, Natural Language Processing, 8: 63-74.
MacDorman, K. F. & Ishiguro, H. (2006). The uncanny advantage of using androids in social and cognitive science research. Interaction Studies, 7(3), 297–337.
Norman D.A. (2004) Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Books, New York.
Sabanovic S., Reeder S., Kechavarzi B. (2014) Designing robots in the wild: In situ prototype evaluation for a break management robot. Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, 3(1): 70-88.
Weiss A., Wurhofer D., Tscheligi M. (2009) “I love this dog”—children’s emotional attachment to the robotic dog AIBO. Intl. J. of Social Robotics, 1(3): 243-248.
Wilks Y. (Ed.) (2010) Close engagements with artificial companions: key social, psychological, ethical and design issues, Natural Language Processing, 8. John Benjamins Publishing.
Złotowski J., Proudfoot D., Yogeeswaran K., Bartneck C. (2015) Anthropomorphism: opportunities and challenges in human–robot interaction. Intl. J. of Social Robotics, 7(3): 347-360