In a Nutshell, s.2 e.19: Humans, Robots & Cats with Lynn de Rijk
In the Vox podcast In a Nutshell, hosts Jara Majerus and Antonia Leise take a deep dive into the university's most interesting, strange, and exciting research. Every two weeks, they invite Radboud researchers to talk about their favourite topics – explained in bite-sized episodes. In the second episode of the AI special, Antonia talks with Lynn de Rijk about robots – and cats.
How advanced are robots? Why do we communicate differently with them than with other humans? And why are cats, in the end, perhaps better companions than robots?
Follow us!
Interested listeners can follow In a Nutshell on Spotify, Amazon Music, PocketCasts and AntennaPod (App). Or stay up to date on In a Nutshell’s official Instagram account.
In today’s episode, Antonia talks with Lynn de Rijk about how we communicate with beings that aren’t human, or, differently put: how we communicate with cats and robots. And why that is sometimes anything but straight-forward. Lynn talks about her research at the cat café in Nijmegen and Amazon robots that have already ceised to exist before they even hit the consumer market.
Lynn de Rijk is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts and part of the Centre for Language Studies. They investigate how humans attribute meaning to non-verbal conduct – especially between humans and non-humans.
Would you like to learn more about communication between humans, cats, robots and others? Then follow Lynn’s suggestion and have a look at the books Ways of Being by James Bridle and Animal Languages by Eva Meijer.
We are now on Instagram
Do you want to discover interesting research topics? And have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of a podcast? You can now follow us on the official In a Nutshell Instagram account (@inanutshell.podcast).