Most of us still don’t have robots in the home, but for decades now, we’ve been waiting for machines to do our bidding. Tresset believes that it might be a good idea to imbue all personal robots with some sort of artistic skill to encourage an emotional bond—it might allow for more trust, perhaps, though you can also see how overly identifying with a machine might create some existential questions.
Another project that Tresset has begun work on recently might have more immediately apparent benefits: using Paul-like technology to help those with limited or no use of their limbs to create art. When Tresset lost his own passion for painting, his robots became “a kind of prosthetic for my loss of sensibility,” he told me in an email after the meeting. “[C]reativity can be a great help to overcome sadness, depression, and solitude.”