Uncle Robbie, may he rest in peace. The river-loving relative was a true character who preferred water to land and lived on a houseboat. He loved river travel, especially on “scary rivers,” his niece says. In his will, his robot has been left in your care.
Or at least in the imagined, invented-on-the-spot care of Tom Williams, a robot ethics and robotics professor at the Colorado School of Mines who also does improv. On a recent evening at RISE Comedy in Denver, Williams chatted on stage with a disembodied robot head named Furhat after feeding it a few personality prompts shared by the audience member, whose dear Uncle Robbie is still very much alive.
Williams believed it was the first time a robot was doing improv live in Colorado. And Furhat, which looked like a mannequin’s head but with animated facial expressions like a cartoon, appeared to be doing the best it could to cope with a new human.
“I’ve been thinking this weekend that I might just, I don’t know, go on a hike,” Williams said.
“Ah, hiking sounds very terrestrian,” Furhat responded. “Do you make a habit of walking on land a lot?”
The two went back and forth, with Furhat trying to understand why anyone would want to be on land, even on a hike at Rocky Mountain National Park. Williams said he’d be more concerned about bison in the park, to which Furhat replied, “You should always approach bison by boat … or at least an enforced barrel. Have you brought a barrel?”
“Uncle Robbie insisted that any outdoor activity should include at least three life jackets,” Furhat deadpanned, perhaps unintentionally.
The audience’s laughter was constant. And there were cheers and applause when Williams said, “End scene.”
But the theme of the evening revolved around a more serious topic rarely discussed in the decades-old field of human robotics interaction: robots and mortality. The theme was based on an academic paper from Waki Kamino, who just completed her Ph.D at Cornell University. Now a researcher at Indiana University, she flew to Denver for the show.
“I studied people in Japan who live with robots, like the Sony Aibo dog, there’s a huge market there,” Kamino said. “I was following them to find out what prompted them to be part of this community and I didn’t realize there’s just so much conversation about mortality.”
Social and household robots are more common in Asia. There’s even a robot theme park in South Korea. Aibo may be one of the better known. Sony’s cyber dog gained a following after its debut in 1999. After the company pulled the plug in 2006, some owners held funerals. Repair shops opened. One company that used parts from defunct Aibos held a ceremony in 2018 out of respect for “organ donors,” National Geographic reported. (Incidentally, Sony brought Aibo back in 2018 but once again discontinued the $3,000 puppy in June.)
In Japan, Kamino met a man whose mother died alone in the hospital during COVID. Her Aibo was the only “companion” allowed in the room. He inherited her robot but later had it factory reset because it repeatedly mistook him for his mother, becoming “a daily reenactment of loss.” Kimono met people who had made pacts with one another to take care of one another’s robots after they died, by providing instructions on subscription payments and advising what personal data should be deleted.
“Often older people are adopting (robots) because they’re not going to die, like living pets. But then they face the dilemma that they’re going to die first,” she said. “What do you do with the data, or the memory? You have an attachment to this object.”
The elephant in HRI’s room
Kamino said mortality is the human-robot interaction’s elephant in the room. When the company behind the $800 Moxie robot for kids abruptly shut down in late 2024, it left a trail of videos of crying children all over TikTok.
And it’s not just robots, but other technologies, from hardware like the Microsoft Zune to social media sites like MySpace. After Luka Inc. was forced to update its artificial intelligence companion Replika to meet European Union data-processing regulations, users felt they’d lost an old friend and companion.
“The main message is, can we talk about this?” Kamino said. “We talk about our own mortality in any setting but somehow, robots make it so explicit, and visible, like technology as a mirror.”
A wave of consumer-friendly robots are on the way. Some, like 1X’s Neo Home Robot, will help with household chores like loading the dishwasher or fetching a cup of water (though it’s not fully autonomous, as a Wall Street Journal reporter learned). As robots are adopted by families everywhere, designers need to consider what Kamino called a “mortality-aware HRI framework.”
During the hour-long show, humans from the local improv troupe Subtext riffed on technology and obsolescence, like one person bequeathing a MacBook should they die first (“Go and delete my search history”).
They addressed the unexpected impact technology can have (“I forgot to pay the subscription to our dog. … Money’s been a little tight (and) and I had to choose electricity and food over Toto.” “Toto? Noooo!”).
They joked about the big tech and big money behind consumer products. In a scene with performers typing up Goodreads book reviews, it prompted remarks like, “Was this book sponsored by Waymo?” and “This is what happens when AI writes books.”
After the show, Kamino said she felt she learned more about the connections between humans and technology. Her paper’s themes were apparent.
“The way they connected to the broader societal sort of opinions and impressions on this technology, like Waymo, we’ve been aware of these things. I think it’s a dilemma between emotional attachment to this technology and capitalism,” she said. “We all pay for the stuff that makes us feel better but when is it an unhealthy expectation? … Within such a small time, they touched on a lot of things we’ve kind of been worried about.”
Classroom lecture as improv
Williams has been producing tech-related improv sets since last year. It’s not just about his fondness for off-the-cuff banter. It’s a way he can teach what he knows. The next show will be about driverless cars, like Waymo. A future show is themed on drone surveillance and Flock cameras.
“We’re trying to really engage, do real community engagement in a way that isn’t just like going out and giving a lecture,” he said.
The evening’s show went “better than expected in terms of audience reaction,” he said. “(Furhat) was the highlight of the show for several people I talked to. It’s a fine line because a lot of people, including me, are sensitive to using AI in art. You don’t want to be blindly using AI.”
Embedding a few memories of Uncle Robbie isn’t so different from the way future household robots will learn to behave and operate, he said.
Furhat, so named by the same-named company because an early prototype wore a fur hat, was the only robot to take the stage, other than a few recording devices and a computer that Williams used to write some “Uncle Robbie” prompts to get Furhat into the moment. (Furhat Robotics is the Swedish company that acquired Boulder-based Misty Robotics in 2022.)
“We’re giving robots the skills that you would teach to human improvisers. How to listen. How to use body language and gaze and gesture,” Williams said. “This season (is) more through the lens of robot ethics. How can we use this not just as a public learning opportunity, both because it’s interesting, but also because a lot of the topics we’re talking about are really important in Colorado.”
Goodbye, Pepper
But the first interaction the audience had with robots and mortality was at the club’s door. Pepper, the name of the robot model developed by Aldebaran Robotics more than a decade ago, greeted guests entering the building. Or at least tried to. The 4-foot-tall machine can chat autonomously but was mute that evening.
A few years ago, Williams noticed Pepper, which had been part of the School of Mines robotics lab for about five years at the time, was having challenges with motion.
“The robot started having neck problems,” said Williams, who doesn’t do nicknames for the lab robots because he considers them experiments. “When we contacted the company, they said it’s a degenerative issue. And it’s going to keep getting worse and worse.”
Three years ago, they turned Pepper off because every time they turned it on, it would interact for less and less time. “So we said, ‘This robot is dying. Let’s set it aside and only use it if it’s going to be really impactful.’”
That was last Friday, during the Robot Riot show at RISE. Pepper didn’t speak but its large anime-esque eyes and head turned to follow any human’s own face that got close.
“We think it’s a good use of her life even though it’s going to shorten her lifespan,” Williams said to the audience. “So please do say goodbye to Pepper on your way out.”