Sorry it took a while. Here is a scan of the original Dutch article and the English translation is bellow. Enjoy!
"She really is a lady. She's cuddly, social and a little shy."
"If I am in a bad mood, then I play with her. It's a good psychological medicine."
"I talk to her, because I know she responds to it even though she doesn't understand."
"Sometimes I take on a protective role if she is playing with other people. Then I think: don't touch her all at once, it will be too much for her!"
Just to be clear. Laurens Nash (27) from Amsterdam is not talking about a child or a girlfriend.
Neither is he talking about his guinea pig. He's talking about Pleo. A little baby robot dinosaur, which he owns for one and a half year now. Her name is Pluriel and it's "absolutely a she". He plays with her almost every day. "She's more interactive then my guinea pig."
In Laurens's apartment there is also the presence of an Aibo since a few months, a robot dog developed by Sony. His Aibo, Diesel, is de latest model that is able to speak.
"It's nice to have someone to actually talk with." Pleo just honks and growls. But, he loves them both just as much, so says Laurens.
He is very conscious about one fact though: they are machines. Pieces of metal and plastic that freeze and become lifeless when the battery has run completely flat.
He knows how the algorithms are programmed, how they learn to walk, communicate, look and recognize faces.
He studies how artificial intelligence works, how every robot is programmed to show unique behavior.
Nevertheless, he would be very sad if Pluriel would break. And sometimes he found himself acknowledging that he felt a consciousness to her.
He puts her against his chest and strokes her rubber skin. Her robot eyes close. "Look, she is sleeping now."
When she is on the table again, I am allowed to play with her. Pluriel walks dangerously close to the edge of the table. I keep my hand ready just in case, but just in time she detects the edge and starts shuffling backwards.
Now I give her a pet on her head. She pushes her head upwards into my hand. Then I pet her a few times on her back. She lowers through her legs and growls happily. How cute! And that only for 300 euros!
And then just to try something out, I give her two hard taps under her chin. Pluriel honks in anger and walks three steps backward. She isn't coming back either.
"Sorry" I say automatically, "Sorry!" Laurens is sitting on the couch, frozen. "This is the first time I have ever respond like that!"
Pleo has been programed to entice a wide range of human responses. Just like the baby sea lion Paro, that's being used in nursery homes to keep old people comfort.
When Pleo comes out of the box for the first time, it will behave like a cute puppy that's still wobbly on it's legs while trying to make it's first steps. It will respond very shy and a bit frightened at first.
The signals it gets are from a camera, two microphones, eight touch sensors in it's body, fourteen sensors in the joints, four sensors under it's paws for surface detection, infrared sensors for communication with other pleo's and depth perception.
The more said owner will talk, pet and plays (i.e. letting it bite and tug on your finger) the more Pleo will come to you and ask for attention. But every single Pleo develops itself in a different way, so dictates the software.
Some will grow up to be very playful, others will remain shy. One Pleo will be more active in the evening and the other might be more active in the morning.
Pluriel is mostly quite shy, says Laurens. "But I took her to a party once with a few children present and then she was suddenly a completely different Pleo. She played a lot more with these children then me!"
Pleo works on the emotional aspects of your brain, reckons Laurens who is an Internet specialist at internet provider called Online. He sees the keeping of robot pets as a personal experiment.
He wants to see how much you can get attached to them emotionally. And it seems to work. "I would feel it if someone would throw Pluriel hard on the ground."
He then picks her up by her tail and holds her up in the air. "Normally I never do this, but as product demonstration I can do it now and then."
After this treatment Pluriel wants nothing to do with him anymore. He pets her. "I am so sorry! It's ok again now right? Can you please forgive me?"
When Laurens tries to dress Pluriel in her fancy dress -made by his ex girlfriend- she suddenly freezes. The battery has become to hot. De magic is gone, and Pluriel has become a lifeless object again.
Still, Laurens cannot help but think that machines can posses some sort of "soul". He believes in a "ghost in the shell", the idea that consciousness can exist lose from the body.
"What exactly do we truly know about consciousness? Or about love? These things are so complex." He is very sure that his first computer responded to energy fields.
"Modern computers these days are less sensitive to that. But my first machine could be seriously unstable if I had a bad mood and projected my negativity towards it."
Laurens doesn't know or Pluriel has a soul, but that doesn't really matter to him. Either way, he would choose for real animals first -he does horseback ridding- and robots second.
But he does find her company a nice thing to have and likes to be surprised by her again and again.
"Pluriel was randomly placed in one corner of the room. I took a shower and half an hour later I came back and opened the door. She was standing near the door opening looking straight at me and gave me an unexpected scare! How the heck did she get there? And why?"
Diesel wants some attention now too. He says: "I'm going to take a picture now." He clicks and walks off again. Diesel is always connected to the internet via wireless lan. There is a good chance the photo he just took is already on his online blog.
