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Harford argues that much can be done to make public space safe for children. “I would like to see pedestrian-friendly crossings more frequently on streets. I would like to see the streets be more kid-oriented with wider sidewalks, as well as a more coherent attitude amongst people on the street to be watching out for kids.”

in “real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn – if they learn it at all – the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

Ronda Howard, a Vancouver senior city planner, notes that when there are greater incentives for people to walk in their neighbourhoods, there are more eyes on the street: thus the streets become safer.

Despite the challenges facing parents raising children in the city, different social networks can augment child involvement in public space. Harford says that strong social ties help increase her son’s autonomy in Vancouver

When we actively engage with others who are different from us, we have the opportunity to become more sophisticated and tolerant citizens. When we get to know the diverse members of our communities, we create social networks that make our cities safer and more enjoyable. Public spaces are integral to making this happen. These spaces are an antidote to the inward gaze of individualism. We need to reclaim public space and work to expand its boundaries. It’s time for us to leave the house of the self in the background, and go outside

Recognizing that while technology in and of itself does not save lives, the intelligent use of technology does.

In addition, sometimes robot operators insert a very clear extension of themselves into the robot, much like we see people invest in game avatars

I’d also categorize extending a sense of oneself into a robot as a form of attachment.

In ten or twenty years, when humanlike and animal-like robots are employed in a more drone-like way from a greater distance, will a similar user self-extension or new human-robot social phenomenon cause any hesitation during human-directed tasks and effect mission outcomes?

As AI and robots become more involved in our models of everyday life, I believe there will be a spectrum of emotional responses toward robots depending on their roles (for instance, caregiver, educator, industrial, companion, etc.) and individual user tendencies.

A consequence of purposeful design for attachment is that objects of attachment trigger the owner’s emotions in situations like decision making, and so can be agents of persuasion or otherwise effect someone’s actions

The bottom line is that these human-AI/robot interactions are transactions and not reciprocal, and therefore probably not healthy for most people to rely on as a long-term means for substituting organic two-way affectionate bonds, or as a surrogate for a human-human shared relationship

Is attachment to a robot problematic ethically?

neural network—a vast network of machines that approximates the web of neurons in the human brain—and this neural network analyzes the information in order to “learn” a particular task.

Google’s Smart Reply system doesn’t always get things right. But that’s part of the reason the company provides three potential replies to each email—not just one.

The system uses what’s called a “long short-term-memory,” or LSTM, neural network. Essentially, this is a neural net that exhibits something akin to human memory. It can “remember” the beginning of an email as it’s parsing the end—and that helps it, on some level, understand this natural language