Name: 【TED】Kate Darling: Why we have an emotional connection to robots (Why we have an emotional connection to robots | Kate Darling)
Uploaded: 2018-11-06T16:29:54.000Z
Duration: 11 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Krystian Aparta

when I asked a friend to hold a baby dinosaur robot upside down.

It was this toy called a Pleo that I had ordered,

and I was really excited about it because I've always loved robots.

And this one has really cool technical features.

And one of the things it had was a tilt sensor,

And I thought this was super cool, so I was showing it off to my friend,

and I said, "Oh, hold it up by the tail. See what it does."

So we're watching the theatrics of this robot

And then I pet the robot to make it stop crying.

And that was kind of a weird experience for me.

For one thing, I wasn't the most maternal person at the time.

Although since then I've become a mother, nine months ago,

and I've learned that babies also squirm when you hold them upside down.

But my response to this robot was also interesting

because I knew exactly how this machine worked,

and yet I still felt compelled to be kind to it.

that I've spent the past decade pursuing.

And one of the things I discovered was that my treatment of this machine

was more than just an awkward moment in my living room,

that in a world where we're increasingly integrating robots into our lives,

an instinct like that might actually have consequences,

because the first thing that I discovered is that it's not just me.

In 2007, the Washington Post reported that the United States military

was testing this robot that defused land mines.

And the way it worked was it was shaped like a stick insect

and it would walk around a minefield on its legs,

and every time it stepped on a mine, one of the legs would blow up,

and it would continue on the other legs to blow up more mines.

And the colonel who was in charge of this testing exercise

to watch this damaged robot drag itself along the minefield.

Now, what would cause a hardened military officer

Well, of course, we're primed by science fiction and pop culture

to really want to personify these things,

but it goes a little bit deeper than that.

It turns out that we're biologically hardwired to project intent and life

onto any movement in our physical space that seems autonomous to us.

So people will treat all sorts of robots like they're alive.

They've had funerals for them with gun salutes.

And research shows that we do this even with very simple household robots,

It's just a disc that roams around your floor to clean it,

but just the fact it's moving around on its own

and feel bad for the Roomba when it gets stuck under the couch.

And we can design robots specifically to evoke this response,

that people automatically, subconsciously associate

And there's an entire body of research called human-robot interaction

So for example, researchers at Stanford University found out

that it makes people really uncomfortable

when you ask them to touch a robot's private parts.

So from this, but from many other studies,

we know, we know that people respond to the cues given to them

Now, we're headed towards a world where robots are everywhere.

Robotic technology is moving out from behind factory walls.

And as these machines that can sense and make autonomous decisions and learn

I think that maybe the best analogy we have for this

Thousands of years ago, we started to domesticate animals,

and we trained them for work and weaponry and companionship.

And throughout history, we've treated some animals like tools or like products,

and other animals, we've treated with kindness

and we've given a place in society as our companions.

I think it's plausible we might start to integrate robots in similar ways.

And I can tell you, from working with roboticists,

that we're pretty far away from developing robots that can feel anything.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Kate Darling: Why we have an emotional connection to robots (Why we have an emotional connection to robots | Kate Darling)

potential

instinct

engage

empathy