Kate Darling likes to ask you to do
terrible things to cute robots. At a
workshop she organised this year,
Darling asked people to play with a
Pleo robot, a child's toy dinosaur.
The soft green Pleo has trusting eyes
and affectionate movements. When
you take one out of the box, it acts
like a helpless newborn puppy – it
can't walk and you have to teach it
about the world.
Yet after an hour allowing people to
tickle and cuddle these loveable
dinosaurs, Darling turned
executioner. She gave the
participants knives, hatchets and
other weapons, and ordered them to
torture and dismember their toys.
What happened next "was much
more dramatic than we ever
anticipated," she says.
For Darling, a researcher at
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, our reaction to robot
cruelty is important because a new
wave of machines is forcing us to
reconsider our relationship with
them. When Darling described her
Pleo experiment in a talk in Boston
this month, she made the case that
mistreating certain kinds of robots
could soon become unacceptable in
the eyes of society. She even
believes that we may need a set of
"robot rights". If so, in what
circumstance would it be OK to
torture or murder a robot? And what
would it take to make you think
twice before being cruel to a
machine?
Until recently, the idea of robot
rights had been left to the realms of
science fiction. Perhaps that's
because the real machines
surrounding us have been relatively
unsophisticated. Nobody feels bad
about chucking away a toaster or a
remote-control toy car. Yet the
arrival of social robots changes that.
They display autonomous behaviour,
show intent and embody familiar
forms like pets or humanoids, says
Darling. In other words, they act as if
they are alive. It triggers our
emotions, and often we can't help it.
For example, in a small experiment
conducted for the radio show
Radiolab in 2011, Freedom Baird of
MIT asked children to hold upside
down a Barbie doll, a hamster and a
Furby robot for as long as they felt
comfortable. While the children held
the doll upside down until their
arms got tired, they soon stopped
torturing the wriggling hamster, and
after a little while, the Furby too.
They were old enough to know the
Furby was a toy, but couldn't stand
the way it was programmed to cry
and say "Me scared".
It's not just kids that form surprising
bonds with these bundles of wires
and circuits. Some people give
names to their Roomba vacuum
cleaners, says Darling. And soldiers
honour their robots with "medals" or
hold funerals for them. She cites one
particularly striking example of a
military robot that was designed to
defuse landmines by stepping on
them. In a test, the explosions
ripped off most of the robot's legs,
and yet the crippled machine
continued to limp along. Watching
the robot struggle, the colonel in
charge called off the test because it
was "inhumane", according to the
Washington Post.
Killer instinct
Some researchers are converging on
the idea that if a robot looks like it is
alive, with its own mind, the tiniest
of simulated cues forces us to feel
empathy with machines, even
though we know they are artificial.
Earlier this year, researchers from
the University of Duisburg-Essen in
Germany used an fMRI scanner and
devices that measure skin
conductance to track people's
reactions to a video of somebody
torturing a Pleo dinosaur – choking
it, putting it inside a plastic bag or
striking it. The physiological and
emotional responses they measured
were much stronger than expected,
despite being aware they were
watching a robot.