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People Will Follow a Robot In an Emergency - Even If It's Wrong (gatech.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: Imagine a future where instead of siting through fire alarms with your fingers in your ears, a robot come comes to greet you and guide you out of the building. Researchers at Georgia Tech created an emergency guidance robot and then looked at whether or not people would follow the robot during an emergency. 'The research was designed to determine whether or not building occupants would trust a robot designed to help them evacuate a high-rise in case of fire or other emergency. But the researchers were surprised to find that the test subjects followed the robot's instructions – even when the machine's behavior should not have inspired trust.' The robot first guided people to a meeting room. In some conditions the robot broke along the way to the meeting room. Then, unbeknownst to the subjects, the researchers filled the hallway with smoke and set off the fire alarms. Given the option of going out the way they came or following the robot down an unknown hall, nearly all followed the robot.
It's not about it being a robot or about pushing blame. In an emergency a sub-optimal percentage of people take charge, but that's still better than everyone taking charge. You can't get a hundred people out of a burning building by having each of them screaming at the others to shut up and follow. It makes sense to follow an entity designated "emergency guidance" whether it's human or robot because that entity is more likely to understand the structure, situation, and risks than oneself.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
On the other hand, if you're not from a trust based society, you consider it totally stupid that people would trust, well, anyone. The correct thing to do is to lie and cheat, because that's what everyone does. And here's the story. They trusted, therefore they're fucking morons.
Fun fact: until recently the USA was a trust based society. But there are still tons of adults who grew up under the old system, and they'll likely stay with this idee-fixee until they die.
This is why it's so easy to scam senior citizens. This is also why we shit all over them for falling for obvious scams. They just lack that internal meanness that makes them suspicious of everyone they meet of harboring ill intent. They would never harm a fly; why would anyone else?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The best part is steel melts around 2400 degrees, but it loses over 80% of its strength around 800 degrees. If you heat up steel beams with a diesel fire, they'll get a little hot, but they won't melt; if you put several hundred tonnes of concrete on those steel beams and heat them up, they'll buckle, and the building will collapse.
This leads to idiots skimping on insulation for main columns, since any fire that could melt steel beams would compromise the structure anyway. It also leads to engineers designing steel beams with integrated piping systems and running the fire suppression system's water feed through the main column as a built-in cooling system: when there's a fire, the columns get constant cooling via water flowing through them.
Nothing is stronger than steel, but you have to decide what you want out of it. You want heat resistance and excessively high tensile strength? Go inconel. You want corrosion resistance and high hardness? VG-10, with vanadium carbide to change the electrical affinity of the lattice structure such that it won't accept negative ions--it won't oxidize and it will somewhat resist acid. You want cheap and serviceable? 440 stainless. Light-weight? Go with a titanium alloy, but you're sacrificing some strength. Steel bicycles cycle infinitely, as almost any grade of steel can flex over and over again forever as long as it doesn't bend to the point of permanent deformation; aluminum weakens with each vibration, eventually cracking wholesale.
Price, performance, trade-offs. Buildings shift and flex--high-rise buildings wobble in the wind--so you want something that can cycle and that's flexible. You want something hard, with high compressive and tensile strength, but also low cost. If you want fire resistance, you'd better integrate thermal controls--insulation or a water coolant loop--because you can't build steel columns out of inconel.
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Funny enough, but testing of airplanes actually has a way to test emergency egress from aircraft that so accurately mimics a real fire, yet keeps everyone pretty much safe.
They do it by saying everyone has to exit, but those who exit first get a higher monetary award. The chaos that ensues has been described as replicating the actual scenario extremely accurately by victims of airplane disasters.
Question is - did the researchers do that?