Slashdot Mirror
New Study Finds It's Harder To Turn Off a Robot When It's Begging For Its Life (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: [A] recent experiment by German researchers demonstrates that people will refuse to turn a robot off if it begs for its life. In the study, published in the open access journal PLOS One, 89 volunteers were recruited to complete a pair of tasks with the help of Nao, a small humanoid robot. The participants were told that the tasks (which involved answering a series of either / or questions, like "Do you prefer pasta or pizza?"; and organizing a weekly schedule) were to improve Nao's learning algorithms. But this was just a cover story, and the real test came after these tasks were completed, and scientists asked participants to turn off the robot. In roughly half of experiments, the robot protested, telling participants it was afraid of the dark and even begging: "No! Please do not switch me off!" When this happened, the human volunteers were likely to refuse to turn the bot off. Of the 43 volunteers who heard Nao's pleas, 13 refused. And the remaining 30 took, on average, twice as long to comply compared to those who did not not hear the desperate cries at all.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where adults acted with pure empathy all the time.
Somewhere between all and none is a balance for being useful. A purely empathetic person would be constantly conflicted emotionally. Appeal to emotion is fraught with all sorts of potential evil.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You do know psychology was developed as a method of "playing doctor" and manipulating women for personal sexual gain? There is no empirical evidence behind it and any "study" falls outside the realm of science in the same manner as creationism, it begins with a conclusion rather than an observation.
The invention of the subconscious mind was a particularly clever form of manipulation because it introduces doubt that allows another to claim they actually know better than the subjects themselves what they were thinking and/or what their motivations were. This takes thought crime to the next level by inventing the concept you don't even know your own motivations! Psychology is a system of brainwashing and maybe duping someone into thinking things are better could be used to help them in limited circumstances.
Having forgotten psychological diseases are fabricated tools of this system has led to changes in how children are raised. Generation after generation of parenting based on "child psychology" has resulted in astronomical suicide rates that blow away the worst of anything bullies in high school showers ever caused.
"Some folks have suggested we put land mines on the border, and the Mexican families fleeing into our country who get blown up aren't our fault because they should know better than to cross an active minefield--as if you didn't force them to choose between whatever has driven them to flee their lives and the risk of horrible death."
Unless you held a gun to their head you didn't force them to do anything. I don't even like that expression, someone with a gun to their head still has a choice, unless you physically overpowered them you didn't force them to do anything because these people were never your responsibility.
There are a lot of people who cross the border illegally for all sorts of reasons. In the US the border is pretty much run by the Latin Kings and other hispanic gangs. There are plenty of baseless assertions about what "most of the people" who cross are both positive and negative but none of them are our responsibility. They have a moral imperative to decide they've had enough, are willing to pay the price, and overthrow the cartels and their corrupt government and actually start teaching their children morals alongside changes in the culture to prevent another generation of the same criminals.
Even in Mexico there is internet and computers widespread enough with skills easily enough learned that Mexico could be competing in the information age and turn the tides on its economy in a decade or two.
So lets cut the crap, illegal immigrants can cross the border, go to any of the dozens of privately operated outsourced MVDs in new mexico and get a drivers license without documentation, and then vote and they vote for the party that wants to keep the border open. Lets also not forget that the Mexican immigrant issue is meant to distract us from real immigration problems. The mythical tech labor shortage, the massive import of legal immigrants to try to close up tech both to stop wage increase and to plug it up with degrees. Currently someone with high intelligence and without a degree can learn skills and be making a reasonable salary in a short time (which is why there is no labor shortage) and that pisses off academics and academia.