A report out of Tokyo about a new breed of robots designed to watch children is fascinating and freaky in equal parts.

The fascinating:

If parents want to leave their children with the kid-sized machine, they arrange for the youngsters to wear special badges that bear codes which the robot can read.

The robot can then identify the children by their names and ages and chat with them, even though its vocabulary remains limited.

The kind of freaky:

The robot, developed with leading robot-maker Tmusk, can also use a projector in one of its eyes to beam advertising messages — or to show pictures that it has captured with a camera installed in the other eye.

The somehow freakier:

Another objective is to make sure that children are accustomed to robots, which are expected to be increasingly common in day-to-day life in Japan.

Is it just paranoid me, or could ‘accustomed’ eventually read ’subservient’?

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