Week 2: Pepper, the Future of Technology

Meet Pepper!!

Pepper is a "Chatbot", which was created as a sort of mobile Siri. Pepper will react to the emotions you are putting out, and have conversations with you. At the moment, Pepper can be used primarily as a way for people to communicate, either in a nursing home, or in a hospital.

The elephant in the room here is that a robot like this might start taking over the job industry. In reality, Pepper is about as far as artificial intelligence has come, and is essentially a rolling Siri. However, if we look at who has been investing in these bots' development in the past, we can see that it has been primarily supported by large corporations, primarily within the auto industry. If anything, this development could only help the job industry. With bots to work the lower income jobs, it could bring more opportunities for more people to have a higher education.

The way this relates to communication, is that it could change the way we interact with others. Can conversations with Artificial Intelligence really replace real human communication? And could it maybe intensify the overload of information we are already inundated with?

The development of these bots has a long way to go, so I don't think we would have to even worry about this within the next 50 years, but in the meantime, it doesn't hurt to dream about the positive change this could bring!

Sources:
https://www.robotsoflondon.co.uk/pepper-chatbot
https://vator.tv/news/2018-01-10-the-future-is-here-pepper-gets-chatbot-integration-so-we-can-talk-to-robots