Gallery: What It Means to Talk To Machines

Meet Sam, a Tweenbot in NYC’s Washington Square Park. Armed with nothing more than a flag that asked passersby to point him toward a particular destination, artist Kacie Kinzer fully expected her creation—made of a battery-operated motor and cardboard—would be crushed, lost, or thrown away. “Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole,” Kinzer says, “some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal.”

If Sam’s destination seemed too dangerous, people sometimes ignored the instructions on the flag: “One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, ‘You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.’”