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.

Comments

Earlier work

[Anonymous Coward]

However, this contradicts earlier experiments by German researchers which demonstrated that volunteers were quite willing to shut off people who were begging for their lives.

Re:See "The Good Place"

[Archangel Michael]

KARA, and she is a robot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Harder if you're a child

[bluefoxlucid]

If I were presented with such a robot, it would be switched off sooner and probably smashed for being so annoying.

Emotional immaturity and anti-social personality disorder. Your response to sympathy is to attack and destroy the thing that makes you feel that way.