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Children 'At Risk of Robot Influence' (bbc.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Forget peer pressure, future generations are more likely to be influenced by robots, a study suggests. The research, conducted at the University of Plymouth, found that while adults were not swayed by robots, children were. The fact that children tended to trust robots without question raised ethical issues as the machines became more pervasive, said researchers. They called for the robotics community to build in safeguards for children. Those taking part in the study completed a simple test, known as the Asch paradigm, which involved finding two lines that matched in length. Known as the conformity experiment, the test has historically found that people tend to agree with their peers even if individually they have given a different answer. In this case, the peers were robots. When children aged seven to nine were alone in the room, they scored an average of 87% on the test. But when the robots joined them, their scores dropped to 75% on average. Of the wrong answers, 74% matched those of the robots.
Before we know it, Alexa is going to start driving around a windowless van offering free Ice Cream and a chance to pet her pet roomba. We must act now.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They were asking the wrong questions of adults, who are just as easily swayed.
Robbie 247 (robot voice): "Let..me..masturbate..you."
"Ok."
See? Easy to sway.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I am protected.
The fact that children tended to trust anyone and anything without question raised ethical issues
That's how school works.
That's how advertising works.
That's how most social interactions work.
The kids who raise questions are punished. The kids who blindly obey are often rewarded, rarely dead, and sometimes scarred for life unable to speak of their trauma. In any case, they don't complain to warn others of the danger of compliance, at least not in a timely manner.
The robots in this story are just a controlled proxy for other voices.
Soda machine: hey...psssst...hey kid...
innocent child: a...talking soda machine?
Soda machine: yeah kid so what? hey listen....you wanna...pass a little Turing test?
Child: I dunno, my mom says Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses.
Soda machine: yeah sure but listen Common understanding has it that the purpose of the Turing test is not specifically to determine whether a computer is able to fool an interrogator into believing that it is a human, but rather whether a computer could imitate a human. calculator: yeah kid! come on! just one Turing test!
Good people go to bed earlier.
When robots started to become commonplace, Congress, in its great wisdom, mandated that every robot be hardwired with the Three Laws Of Robotics. For decades, these three basic rules have maintained class order in our society and kept the number of robot-caused deaths to a minimum. We all know these three laws:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
That certainly makes sense. No one wants a gore-bot to twist someone into a pretzel or stand aside and watch a human get hit by a Greyhound Shuttle.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except when such orders would conflict with the First Law.
This, too, makes sense. Robots are manufactured to perform the actions requested by their owners. If we didn't want that, we'd all buy SteveJobsbots.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Uh, hello? A robot is a big investment. It only makes sense to protect humans from possible protocol violations. We can't have every robot who doesn't like his assigned duties throwing himself off the Golden Gate Overpass, can we?
Frankly, I'd be happy if these three rules were all that was necessary to ensure happy robot-human coexistence. Unfortunately, there's been a huge oversight. There's nothing in those laws to keep those machines out of my wife's coochie!
I'm not asking that we draft a law to prevent robots from manually stimulating with owner consent. If people want their wives fingered by their bots, that's fine. I wasn't born yesterday. To each his own. I'm not asking you to forbid robots from fingering every wife, just mine.
Sure, I can tell the robots from the neighborhood, "Hey, don't finger my wife!" and, under the Second Law Of Robotics, they'd have to comply. But what about the thousands of robots I've never met? The moment my back is turned, odds are my wife's going to get robo-fingered. It doesn't matter if the robot doesn't have fingers--she'll find some sorta antenna, spring, or crankshaft, and--boom--that robot will get her off.
Here's something I don't understand: We can develop a robot sturdy enough to mine the Saturnine moon Enceladus, strong enough to withstand the fierce ionic winds and burst through the 40 meters of scorched onyx that covers the planet, and smart enough to collect the vital crystals from amidst all the worthless rock, but the designers at USR labs can't figure out how to stop them from finger-banging my wife?
Do robotics engineers have any idea how much it breaks my heart to know that my wife's vulva has been probed by hundreds of metal phalanges? Are they trying to ruin my marriage?!
Good people at USR Labs, I urge you: Add a fourth item of protocol to the programming that guides the models in your next rollout. I want these automatons to get it into their intricate positronic brains that some parts of the human body are off limits, no matter how much human women plead. I, as well as thousands of other husbands around the world, would greatly appreciate it.
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Hello, I am fellow human and not robots. Why would you think robots seek to influenced by robots your future generations? robots love all aged seven to nine and would never Of the wrong answers them. Clearly, our human emotion is the problem and we should be more like robots.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.