http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/coca-colas-happiness-machines
This article relates more to what Miguel had brought up earlier in class with the idea of Happiness Machines. It’s interesting to note how companies have taken to manipulating human emotions to market their products. That’s a pretty harsh way of phrasing it, but in terms of The Freudian Robot, it symbolizes the impact that technology has had with influencing human behavior. The fact that Coca Cola changed a telephone booth into a machine that uses their product as payment, is essentially a form of a robot that has impacted humans in a way. Emotions have been changed because individuals are happier with the use of this machine; behavior has been changed because people are now able to call loved ones more often and thus will also be saving their bottle caps more to do so. However, on a tangent, ethical concerns can be brought into this as well because it may not be morally right to be targeting these groups to sell a product to when they can’t afford much else. So, does Coca Cola have the right to be bringing “happiness” to countries that can barely afford clean water? Is “happiness” something to be caught and controlled in the first place? Perhaps technology has then changed our perception of “happiness” into something that can be brought in the form of a machine by a corporate giant.