In an age when “friend” is a verb, many of us have hundreds of social-network friends. But Oxford Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s research suggests that we’re wired to max out our meaningful relationships at about 150. This NPR story has details. Can technology help us break Dunbar’s limit, and is that a worthwhile goal?
Category: 8.5 Interpersonal Computing: From Communication to Communities
Categories
-Multimedia 15.0 Alan Turing, Military Intelligence, and Intelligent Machines 15.1 Thinking About Thinking Machines 15.2 Natural-Language Communication 15.5 Question-Answering Machines 15.6 The Robot Revolution 4.4 The User Interface: The Human-Machine Connection 4.7 Inventing the Future: Tomorrow's User Interfaces I 5.4 Beyond the Printed Page 8.5 Interpersonal Computing: From Communication to Communities 9.3 Internet Issues: Ethical and Political Dilemmas
Conversations with Robots
Be careful–you may be falling in love with a software robot. This episode of Radiolab—NPR’s clever and entertaining broadcast/podcast—explores many ways people talk to machines, including those alluring bots that populate online dating sites. Eliza, Furbie, Clever Bot, Bina—they’re all talking to us, and we’re listening. Radiolab puts it all in perspective in this fascinating program.