With the rise of drones, we’re becoming a lot more conscious of how little robots are interacting with us in everyday life. Recently Mary and I watched an interesting and funny film about that very topic set in the near future called Robot and Frank. Frank is dealing with some kind of Alzheimer’s or dementia and his son, who lives five hours away, thinks a robot will be make his own life a little easier by taking care of Frank for him.
It’s touching, and funny, and also has some jewel heist scenes, which you know always make a movie better. (Free on Netflix if you’re interested.)
It’s good, and it attempts to guess how robots and humans might interact–outside of the usual sci-fi trope of “killer” robots.
But we really are a long ways from this kind of robot. This page of gifs of badly behaving robots is a perfect example of why the “near” future imagined by Robot and Frank (and many other sci-fi movies) is still a ways off.
