“The Hollywood robot comes with a lot of baggage,” says Shyam Sundar, founding director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Penn State. Sundar and his team study people's reception of social robots, and found that robots that appear too human—not in a creepy, uncanny-valley sort of way, but in their abilities—inevitably encourage unrealistic expectations. Most of them, for example, can't open a door, or help you unpack groceries, but arms and a sense of awareness would suggest they can. “The critical thing for a robot assistant is information access, being a butler who fetches information or who places a phone call,” Sundar says. “For those things, human morphology is not only irrelevant, it's also distracting.”
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