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If you saw a robot getting beat up or abused by a human, would you try to stop it from happening, ignore it, or join in on the violence?
It was revealed this week that Boston Dynamics’ Atlas has progressed to the point where it can perform tasks without any human intervention.
It is a major technological achievement to be sure, but what if that advancement resulted in it taking the job of a friend and co-worker? Would it be targeted by someone looking for a little retribution?
We have already seen people make threats against robot police dogs and no one seemed too broke up when a security bot accidentally drowned itself.
Nothing a baseball bat, some bungee cords and two rolls of duct tape couldn't handle
— Jeffrey Scott Holland (@catclawtheatre) April 11, 2023
To shed some light on those questions, Radboud University Nijmegen researcher Marieke Wieringa recently conducted some experiments to see if people would ever actually feel sorry for a robot.
“Some participants watched videos of robots that were either mistreated or treated well. Sometimes, we asked participants to violently shake the robot. We tried out all variations: sometimes the robot didn’t respond, sometimes it did – with pitiful sounds and other responses that we associate with pain,” Wieringa and her team said in a statement.
What they found was that “most people had no problem shaking a silent robot, but as soon as the robot began to make pitiful sounds” or enlarged its “eyes” to convey sadness, people began to feel guilty.
So, while we move closer and closer to autonomous humanoid robots actually living and working side-by-side with humans, really the only thing stopping us from messing with them is if they act… human?
How long do you think it will take artificial intelligence models to learn that and start using that knowledge to their own advantage?