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

Harder if you're a child

[Karmashock]

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.

Re: Harder if you're a child

[Wycliffe]

Things are things and people/animals are living beings. Making a robot play back a recording behaving as if it's fearing for it's life is manipulative.

Although we are no where near there yet, I'm not sure the average person knows that. At what point does a robot become a "living thing" because saying that a robot can never be living because of the material it is made out of is a little short sighted. Is a perfect silicon replica of a human brain not living? Does it not have rights just because it is a simulation on silicon? This would make the ideal slave force but I'm not sure it's ethical to clone human brains to silicon and then command them to work for you 24/7.

See "The Good Place"

[Mister J]

Anyone who's seen Janet begging for her life in The Good Place already knows this. Even if she's not a robot.

Re:See "The Good Place"

[Oswald McWeany]

Anyone who's seen Janet begging for her life in The Good Place already knows this. Even if she's not a robot.

This was exactly the first thought that came to my mind. There again, I'm sure it's hard to kill any robot with a body like that even if it is not begging for its life.

Desensitized

[danbert8]

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.