On The Artefactual Dullness Of Robots

Boredom

I found Amaia’s entry for the first assignment to be original and interesting. Her choice to discuss boredom as a human emotion applied to robots captured my attention a lot, along with the examples she brought in the blog. It also resurfaced memories of my own, since I used to love Tamagotchi and owed a couple myself as a kid – I kind of forgot they do actually sulk when ignored!

Overall, I think I was drawn to her piece because I recognized the same point I was trying to convey in mine: meaning, how much can machines be programmed in a way that makes us think they feel a certain emotion, and how much impact can this performance have on us when we interact with them. 

Yawning Tom is then stuck in a waiting loop, a perpetual state of dullness that makes him act on one of the aforementioned boredom-based motions in his programming. I'd say it's quite a simple idea, yet it conveys the concept of perceived boredom in a very straightforward way - contrary to creatures like the Tamagotchi, Tom is not able to do anything, and nothing can be done to or with him to change that. He can just stand there, and look bored. 

In this sense, then, boredom is not an emotional state elicited by circumstances but an unfixable condition, which works just fine in the context of making people doubt on whether a robot can actually feel bored when not given a task or a job to fulfill.