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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
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.
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.