The original note, as written at the time
Robots that entertain and help people unwind by dancing with them, or teaching them how to dance, or helping them practise how to dance.
Ongoing development
Robots that entertain and help people unwind — by dancing with them, teaching them to dance, or helping them practise.
Of all the uses proposed for humanoid machines, this is the one I would fund first, and not because it is charming.
Dancing is a bodily activity with a social rule and no productive output. That combination is almost unique. Most things a robot can do for a person are tasks, and tasks are exactly where we do not want a machine pretending to be a person — the pretence is wrong and the efficiency is beside the point. Dancing is not a task. It is presence, coordination, timing, and the acceptance of being slightly ridiculous in front of another being.
A machine that can hold you at arm’s length and keep a rhythm while you learn is doing something that is genuinely hard: it must follow rather than lead, and adjust, and be wrong in a way that does not humiliate the human. That is a far more demanding interaction than most assistance work, because the criterion is not whether the step was correct but whether the person relaxed.
And the practitioner case is the honest one. A person learning to dance badly, in their own living room, is a person who will never go to a class. There are hundreds of thousands of them per city. A patient, tireless, unembarrassed partner who will go through the same six bars forty times is not a toy. It is the only way that person will ever dance in public.
I would keep it dumb, too. It does not need to understand music. It needs three joints, a rhythm, a tolerance for being stepped on, and no face — because a face invites a conversation, and the whole value here is that nobody is watching you make mistakes.