In this presentation, the speaker talks about the possibility of people, and specifically children, developing emotional connections to personified robots. In the beginning of the lecture, he presented an interesting scenario about a robot that lives in one’s house that one could develop an emotional connection to because it knows its owner so well. Peter Kahn conducted experiments with children of two different age groups with two different robots. The two robots he used for the purpose of the experiment were the robot dog AIBO, and the vaguely human-looking Robovie.
With AIBO, very young children were used as research subjects. They were evaluated during their interactions with AIBO on the basis of their apprehension, attempts to animate it, moral response, and other factors. In an attempt to balance it out, Professor Kahn also had the children interact with a stuffed dog. In this way, they could rule out any interactions that were simply associated with any artificial dog. What he found was that children generally did not attempt to manually animate the AIBO in the same way that they would a stuffed animal. They also, with one exception, never displayed apprehension with the stuffed animal like they did with the robot. The other group used to test hypotheses on the AIBO was posters on a message board about AIBO. Going through their posts one at a time, their responses were categorized. Roughly 75% of the forum posters displayed a solid knowledge that it was a piece of technology and referred to it as such, and many of them developed an emotional attachment to the AIBO. However, only 12% assigned any kind of moral standing the AIBO, such as it being morally wrong to damage the AIBO, the same as a real dog.
The tests with Robovie were done exclusively with children. They were led around a building with a Robovie, and interacted with it for an extended period of time. Tests conducted during this time included a discussion between the Robovie and the experimenter about the type of coral in a fish tank, and a situation where the robot was being morally slighted. What the researchers found was that not only did the children assign moral status to the robot, they attempted to intervene in the experiment on the robot’s behalf. One child even tried to come up with new ways for the robot to resolve the dilemma as it was being put away.
In summary, the age of the person interacting with the robot seems to have a large impact on the amount of emotional bonding they create. Interestingly, there are parallels between this and other information technology. Generally, the earlier in life someone is introduced to computers and other IT devices, the more comfortable they are with them throughout their lifetime. Also, our intellectual knowledge that something is merely mimicking human or animal behavior is often not sufficient to prevent emotional bonds from developing. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on our interactions with machines and other humans in the decade ahead.
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