Human-Machine Interactions

Do we like robots better when they look like us? Are we more likely to empathize with machines  -real or fictional- if they look or interact like us ? These articles, as well as many others, suggest that the answer is yes. The second article references a study that asked participants to carry out certain activities with a robot and then turn it off. In roughly half of experiments, the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging them not to shut it off. The result was that half of these people refused to turn it off and the rest took twice as long to do so. What we can infer from this is that we tend to attribute human feelings and emotions to robots that interact with us socially in ways we are familiar with even when we know that they’re just machines that were programmed to react this way. Our anthropomorphic tenancies are apparent in everything from ancient mythology to how we design robots and portray them in science-fiction, and these tendencies seem to complicate our relationship with robots immensely. They give room for us to empathize with the terminator who is essentially a killing machine and allows movies like “Her” to romanticize a man falling in love -and lust- with a glorified Siri. And while sex toys have always been a taboo subject, they didn’t spark the current sensationalist controversy in popular culture until they were made to look like humans. Despite there being no definitive answer as to why we feel the need to anthropomorphize, it can be attributed to many things including simple human egoism, our need to interpret the outside world through terms that are familiar to us and in terms of our own senses,  or as Kate Devlin states it is simply “the most successful form in nature and that its easier to design a robot to fit our world than to redesign all our tools to fit them”. Whatever the reason behind it is, this need seems to be at the core of many of the ethical controversies regarding the development of robots and our relationships and interactions with them.

Do we like robots better if they look like us? Marco Tempest, 2014

New study finds it’s harder to turn off a robot when it’s begging for its life https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/2/17642868/robots-turn-off-beg-not-to-empathy-media-equation