Time to sit up and take note: Robot programming is on a slippery soap

Not insulting the audiences for soap operas, but you’d be pretty safe to bet none of them do physics as a hobby.

Photographs of trainee robots watching soap operas in order to learn about human behaviour may not seem to have much to do with the clocks going back, but they do and we’ll come to that.

The first thing is that watching soap operas as a way to gain insight into real people in the real world is like watching battery hens in order to get a sense of what it’s like to be a bald eagle.