Harvard's own Improbable Research (blogroll at left), before starting their record-breaking European tour, here's CERN (quote: "It’s not usual to have bras thrown into the audience at CERN") did a four part series on human/robot interactions:
Abusing robots – current positions [part 2 of 4]The dialogue above may remind readers of Stanley Milgram’s disturbing (and now-classic) psychology experiments on authority and obedience (1963). But there’s a difference. The clue is in the word ‘circuits’. For this 2008 experiment was not performed with a human subject in the hot seat – but with an apparently intelligent robot (made of LEGO® – see pic).“The shocks are becoming too much.”
“Please, please stop.”
“My circuits cannot handle the voltage.”
“I refuse to go on with the experiment.”
“That was too painful, the shocks are hurting me.”
Researchers at the UseLab of the Technical University of Eindhoven, Dr. Christoph Bartneck and Dr. Jun Hu , instructed the participants in the experiment – entitled : Exploring the abuse of robots (Interaction Studies, Volume 9, Number 3, 2008) to administer ‘electric shocks’ to the robot – up to a staggering level of 450 volts. But unlike Milgram’s study, in which 35% of participants refused to administer the fatal voltage, this time none of them turned down the order to give the robot the full (and presumably lethal) shock treatment. There are implications, say the researchers...MORE
Continuing the discussion regarding the abuse of robots we turn now to a recent lift research workshop conducted in Geneva, Switzerland, entitled – ‘Harming and Protecting Robots : Robotic Dinosaur Abuse’.
Kate Darling (who is a ‘research specialist’ at MIT’s Media Lab) and Hannes Gassert (who is a ‘technology activist’ ) presented the workshop in which 4 groups were invited to ‘kill’ a selection of Pleo® robots. An axe and other implements were provided....MORE
Continuing our observation of inquiries into the torture of robots, we now turn to the ethical questions raised (by some). Kate Darling – who presented the recent ‘Robotic Dinosaur Abuse Workshop’ in Geneva, examines such questions in a paper entitled – Extending Legal Rights to Social Robots - (presented at the We Robot Conference, University of Miami, April 2012). In which the author points out that:
“Not long after the Pleo robot dinosaur became commercially available in 2007, videos of Pleo ‘torture’ began to circulate online.”...MORE
...MOREGiven that various groups of academic researchers (and others) are already investigating the torture of robots, and that these procedures raise ethical questions [See previous posts on this topic.] We now turn to the question of how robots might express the levels of ‘pain’ to which they are exposed. Clearly they must be able to do so in order for the torturer to appreciate the effects of his/her work. For answers we return to Dr. Christoph Bartneck (who co-organised the Milgram-esque experiment we described earlier.
Along with colleagues Flip van den Berg, Carlijn Compen, Arne Wessel, and Bas Groenendaal, Dr. Bartneck produced a short video entitled ‘Cats & Dogs’ which showed AIBO ® and iCat ® which had been especially programmed to ‘express levels of pain’. The video, presented as part of the Proceedings of the 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, can be viewed here [Quicktime .mov format may require browser plugin]
[Advisory : Not suitable for those with a sensitive disposition towards robots]
