Greed, Greedy, Great

Starting to think about interesting traits that make us human I quickly found myself thinking about the seven deadly sins also know as the capital vices. Out of these seven sins, I picked greed. Which is in my opinion the most human trait out of the seven. Furthermore is greed defined by the Cambridge dictionary as:


"a very strong wish to continuously get more of something, especially food or money"



In humans this trait is of course seen as a bad one, but what happens when you give this trait to a robot? Is it still a bad one, or could it maybe turn out to be a good one? I think this answer depends on how humanly you will interpret the greedy trait. To support this I have two examples.

The first one is called "Mr Money - The Greedy Tomy Robot Money Bank" developed by the Japanes company Tomy, which makes children's toys and merchandise that were especially popular around the 1980's. The Mr Money robot they manufactured is a cute little robot that has a coin chomping action. This action makes him a moving coin bank for children.



Another example of a "greedy" robot is the Japanese strawberry picking robot. Which is more oriented on food than it would be on the money. In short, it visually recognizes if a strawberry is ripe, and if so it delicately plucks the strawberries to put them in a basket. There is only one problem with the greed of the robot, we humans will still win it. This because the robot is 9 times slower than an experienced human.

Furthermore, what popped into my mind thinking about greed are magpies. These birds are often known for stealing shiny things such as jewelry. This thought let me think of a "magpie robot" that would pick up all shiny things it will see on its way. But you can maybe also describe that as a pickpocket robot, which I think would not be that ethical.