If something’s got no feelings, you can’t hurt it, right? So where’s the harm?
COMMENT
A few years ago, someone asked me for advice on a workplace situation. His company was using a chatbot to help new employees and he had repeatedly noticed one person being disproportionally verbally abusive to it. “What do you think?” he asked me. “Is this an HR issue?”
The truth is, we don’t know. But even though machines can’t feel, it’s worth thinking about what human behaviour is okay.
Over the next decade, our relationships to our devices will become a lot more interesting. Advanced chatbots and robot companions are on the rise, both extremely well-suited to tap into our social nature and make us behave as though we’re interacting with something… alive. This raises the question: what does it mean to be verbally or physically violent toward an artificial agent?
People have already started to wonder. For example, during the mass adoption of virtual voice assistants, parents expressed concern that the little speakers in their living rooms were teaching their kids to be rude. Major companies such as Amazon and Google responded by releasing opt-in features that encouraged the use of ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, to prevent children from barking commands at the devices.
Of course, it’s not the machines we’re hurting, so the main concern is that ‘mistreating’ an artificial agent will lead to bad behaviour in other contexts. In 2015, my colleagues and I took a small step while investigating this idea, by finding a connection between people’s empathic concern and how they were willing to treat a robot. Also, lots of research shows that people who witness violent behaviour toward a robot feel distress.
But even if there’s a link between people’s tendencies for empathy and how they feel toward a robot, that doesn’t answer the question of whether beating up robots makes people more violent. Society has asked similar questions about porn and video games, with some inconclusive results. In many cases, people seem to do fine at compartmentalising (just because I play Grand Theft Auto doesn’t mean I try to run people over in the car park at work).
Perhaps video games are mostly harmless, but does a robot with a body change the equation? We’re physical creatures and studies show that we behave differently toward embodied robots than characters on a screen, in part because we’re biologically hardwired to react to physical motion. People will readily treat any agent that moves like it’s alive, even a randomly moving stick in a resear
