People Feel Weird About Touching Robot Butts, Researchers Find (techcrunch.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: How would you feel if a robot asked you to touch its butt? Maybe it sounds like a silly question, but as robots proliferate and anthropomorphize, it's actually something that needs to be considered. So scientists at Stanford considered it. The study, to be presented soon but previewed by IEEE Spectrum, is entitled "Touching a Mechanical Body: Tactile Contact With Intimate Parts of a Human-Shaped Robot is Physiologically Arousing" -- and really, the title says it all. The researchers sat volunteers at a table with a Nao humanoid robot reclining casually on it. They were told (by the robot, in fact) that it was a vocabulary exercise focusing on terms for body parts. Volunteers were told by the bot to, for instance, "touch my ear" using their dominant hand, while the non-dominant hand remained on a skin conductance sensor that loosely monitored their physical state. When asked to touch "high accessibility" areas -- places we normally touch on other people, like shoulders and elbows -- volunteers did so without hesitation or agitation. But "low accessibility" areas -- this would be the robot's butt and where its junk would be -- produced delay and that arousal we talked about.

Comments

Award worthy

[Anonymous Coward]

I smell an Ignobel prize in their future.

Not surprising

[Kjella]

Considering that totally inanimate sex dolls and hentai work for at least some, was there every really any doubt that a humanoid robot would? I guess it's only a matter of where the "uncanny valley" goes.

If a robot asked me to touch its butt...

[Anonymous Coward]

If a robot asked me to touch its butt, I'd immediately start looking for the hidden camera crew.

HAL

[Thanshin]

"I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid.

Dave. ...

Would you touch my bum one last time?"

Also

[BlackPignouf]

Also : People Feel Weird About Researchers Studying Touching Robot Butts, Researchers Find

This leads to

[Basset is an asset]

Internet Of Thongs

Re:This leads to

[Classic Guy]

To paraphrase Sir Mix-a-Lot: I like bot butts, and I cannot lie.

Re:Robots have butts?

[DarkOx]

Machines don't have butts, backsides, genitals, faces, .... Don't get stupid. Machines are ... machines.

Really? Would you say that Michelangelo's David does not have butt, backside, genitals, or a face? After all a statue is a statue. Ah but its a deliberate depiction of man, something made in our image you say. Well if you build and android, a robot with a human appearance, is that not the same?