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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.
The kind of sentimentality that permits that to work is outright dangerous in an adult. By the time you're past your teens that should be either ignored or annoying... but for it legitimately pull on heart strings?...
If a machine can do that consider how a human being could exploit that to get you to do all sorts of things?
Small children are very vulnerable to that sort of thing... but adults should have grown out of it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Anyone who's seen Janet begging for her life in The Good Place already knows this. Even if she's not a robot.
Windows moves in mysterious ways, its crashes to perform
Sure it works the first few times... But just like the "make sure you software eject your flash drive before ripping it out" warnings, most people might be hesitant the first few times and then say fuck it and start ripping the life out of computers and ignoring the pleas.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
An interesting comment, part of the extras on the Blue-Ray edition from Camille Paglia (definitely not a man-hating SJW, quite the opposite) was that only a man (male) could do something like this --> to do what is absolutely necessary for survival, overcoming every consideration, including empathy. She said the scene looked to her as a cold-blooded, methodical rape, which Dave executes calmly while the victim pleads....
She does make a mistake here IMO - Dave is not calm at all (listen to the breathing) and this act really taxes him to the limits (not only his life is in danger and the AI is pleading, but once he kills HAL he will be completely, utterly alone). In fact, the actor playing Dave said that this scene was the most emotional for him....
In the book [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I] one of the stories (the idea is the authors use fiction stories that discusses the issues of consciousness and then add their commentary) is about a male engineer who argues with a lady that machines can be "alive". Initially she totally rejects the idea talking about reproduction, feelings and so on, claiming a machine can never have that. So he invites her to the lab and shows her very simple device that behaves, more or less like a modern automatic vacuum cleaner. It looks like a beetle, it can detect live sockets and plug itself in, it emits a purring sound when the battery is charging etc. Then he hands her a hammer and says "kill it!" (the engineer pushes all her buttons through language, saying things like "purr" or "bleed" or "hunger"). Turns out the beetle is programmed to avoid being smashed, it flashes red lights, squeals "in fear" and runs around. At the end the girl can't do it and the engineer smashes it calmly.
The moral of the story is that few simple behaviours that can be programmed on something that will never, ever be intelligent can trigger emotional response so strong that we immediately accept that it is alive and we identify ourselves with it. The most important ones: not wanting to cease to exists, actively avoiding destruction, need for "food" and the added bonus of using sound of "purr" or "squeal" when feeding or running from the hammer. The damn thing could be constructed with 70-ies era electronics, it is that simple....