“Hush!” I bellow at Molly, who has interrupted our conversation by asking how she can help. Luckily, Molly won’t take offence, because she’s not human. “Congratulations,” Professor Alan Winfield says to me. “You’ve just interacted with a robot.”
Molly is a care assistant in the assisted-living studio in Bristol Robotics Laboratory, part of the University of the West of England. When you say “robot”, most people tend to think of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator or the beautiful android Ava in Ex Machina; but the lab is taking a bet that the future of robots, and the artificial intelligence that powers them, will be rather more mundane. Molly might look like an iPad taped to a wheelie bin, but one day she could help dementia sufferers stay