BlabDroid

BlabDroids are small, friendly, cardboard robots that roam the world asking people disarmingly personal questions — and people answer them.

With the BlabDroids, Robots in Residence became the world's first documentary shot and directed entirely by pre-programmed robots. It set out to forge a new form of documentary storytelling and, in doing so, experimentally test MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum's infamous "Eliza effect": the tendency to unconsciously assume computer behaviors are analogous to human behaviors. "I had not realized," Weizenbaum noted, "that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people."

The project has since become a reference point in the philosophy of mind: John Campbell's Causation in Psychology (2020) opens with a description of the robot, using it to argue that social robots, however adept at eliciting human confidences, cannot empathize with the human mind.