How Human Should Humanoid Robots Look?
With funding from the AXA Research Fund, I am currently working with my PhD students on a research project that looks at how people interact with humanoid robots. Human/robot relations might prove tricky, especially when it comes to increasingly human-like robots. By investigating how a robot’s appearance affects human/machine interactions and by testing ways to make their machine nature explicit, our experiments will greatly contribute to our understanding of what humanoid robots should look like to allow safe use in the future. In addition to educating people about robots, we aim to affect policy. In particular, our objective is to contribute to answering some of the European Union’s concerns about robot ethics.
Early in my PhD, when I was working on a humanoid robot project, I was confronted repeatedly by well-educated strangers intervening to tell me about the robot’s moral status. Their interventions had no basis in the capacities of the robot (which were negligible at that point), only its appearance and location (the MIT AI Lab). I found the phenomenon strange enough that I decided to publish on it; this eventually led me to work on AI ethics. Now, with a grant from the AXA Research Fund, my PhD students and I are conducting experiments to help people think more rationally about AI.
Project Description
How does a robot’s appearance affect our perception and our understanding of what it really is? In 2010, the United Kingdom published a set of five ethical rules for robotics — the first national level document on AI ethics — to advise those who design, sell and use robots about their responsibilities. One of these ‘Principles of Robotics’ states that “Robots are manufactured artefacts. They should not be designed in a deceptive way to exploit vulnerable users: instead their machine nature should be transparent.” …
By investigating how humans behave around humanoid robots and examining whether making them look human actually does negatively effect people’s relation to artificial intelligence, the project aims to provide solutions for making the robot’s nature explicit, while not hindering potential therapeutic uses.