Trash Talking

From Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, an interesting post on humanizing the kitchen trash can.   Add this to the Roomba and the Aibo, among others we've described in Best Face Forward and related talks, as examples of the increasing humanization of automated interfaces.  My latest favorite:  the roving, networked packs of feral open-source robot dogs used to map toxic waste dumps.  Individually amusing and easily dismissed, collectively and subtly these examples begin to shape our expectations for interacting with automated interfaces -- and with humans themselves ("my trash can is nicer to me than your clerks are!"...)