photo of girl laying left hand on white digital robot

100 More Things #154: PEOPLE CAN FEEL EMPATHY FOR MACHINES

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People’s interactions with machines are moving beyond anthropomorphism and trust. People are now encountering situations in which they’re developing social relationships with machines and robots.

Kate Darling is a research specialist at the MIT Media Lab. She conducts research with a dinosaur toy called Pleo that looks like a baby dinosaur. Darling has people interact with Pleo first on their own, and then she asks them to do hurtful things to Pleo: hitting him, holding him upside down, holding him by the neck, and so on.

Pleo makes distressing noises when people do these things to him. Darling finds that people don’t like to hurt the toy, even though they know it’s not alive and can’t feel what is being done to it.

Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten (2013) used an fMRI machine to study empathy toward machines. She had people watch videos. Sometimes the video showed a person being treated roughly or harmed, and sometimes it was the Pleo toy being hurt.

The same areas of the brain were active when people saw the person or the Pleo being treated poorly.

Confiding in an anthropomorphic robot

BlabDroid is a small, simple-looking robot that asks questions (in a voice that sounds like a small boy), and films the interaction. BlabDroid tells you what button to press to get started, asks questions, and then films the interaction. The questions include:

  • “If there was no money, and no law, what would be the first thing you would do?” “What is the last risk you took?”
  • “Who do you love most in the world?” “When do you feel the most nervous?” “What are you the most proud of?”
  • “If you died tomorrow, what would you regret the most?”

You can watch BlabDroid in action at https://areben.com/project/blabdroid

A creation of Alexander Reben, BlabDroid is remarkable for eliciting open and vulnerable responses from the people it talks to. And BlabDroid is just a box made out of cardboard with a smile on it.

Takeaways

  • When you’re designing the interface of a social machine, realize that people are likely to feel empathy and be willing to talk openly with the machine or robot. Think ahead about how you will handle issues of confidentiality and privacy.
  • When you want people to feel empathy, make the machine a little bit like a human.
  • Don’t ask people to do things to machines or robots that they would be uncomfortable doing to another person (for example, acting threatening or violent).

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