UW researcher: Are humans getting too close to their robot friends?

Here’s a question for you and answer honestly: Was your eye dry when Tom Hanks lost his volleyball buddy Wilson in the movie “Castaway?”

Mine was certainly on the moist side and most of the other people in the theater appeared to be similarly affected by that scene. But for University of Washington researcher and later Dr. Julie Carpenter, what was happening on the screen was what she’d been interested in and studying for some time, namely: humans and the way we bond with inanimate objects.

Her latest work was just published and it looked not at volleyballs, or computers, or cars, but at a technology that is becoming more common and more anthropomorphic all the time: robots. She worked with military personnel whose duties involve using robotic partners to deal with the investigation and disposal of explosives. She wanted to know if they developed relationships with their robots and if so, what that kind of bond might mean.

“There’s been a lot of research on why humans treat inanimate objects as if they were animate. High stress, loneliness, the proximity between the person and the object […] all these are factors,” says Carpenter. “People name their cars or their computer software […] humans are emotional and we are always looking to figure out how to deal with the world.”

In working with the demolitions teams, she found that they “often anthropomorphized (the robots), assigning them human or animal like attributes, including gender, and displayed a kind of empathy towards the machines.”

They often named their robots after wives or girlfriends, but never a name with negative associations, such as an ex-wife or former girlfriend.

Furthermore, Carpenter found that if the robot was disabled or destroyed, its human operator frequently reacted emotionally.

“They felt anger, sadness […] a sense of loss.”

Sometimes they referred to the damaged or destroyed machine as “poor little guy,” or held a mock funeral for the robot. Some even admitted to feeling “responsible” for the robot’s fate, a reaction that Carpenter wouldn’t go so far as to describe as grief, but certainly smacks of Hanks’ agonized apologies as “Wilson” the volleyball drifted out of his reach on the open sea.

Now that’s interesting, but all that data led to the heart of Carpenter’s research. If humans develop emotional attachments to robots designed to spare humans from danger, will the human hesitate at sending a robotic “buddy” into harm’s way or even refuse to do so, just to protect it? If robot design continues the way it’s going now, robots are going to become more “human” in physical design and communication. Will this simply heighten the emotional attachment?

Carpenter plans to work up her latest research into a book and hopes that the military and police forces commit to studying the growing closeness between man and machine.

Maybe the answer is to make our technology more obnoxious. Programming them to shut down at the worst possible time or give us inscrutable instructions after freezing or lie and say there is a paper jam when there is no paper jam, (anyone remember “Office Space?) or –
oh yeah. They already do that.