A study was conducted recently to see if humans attribute moral responsibility to robots. The experiment was simple. The robot would play a game, and after the game is over, make a mistake and tell the person playing that they have lost. The results:
65% of the participants attributed some level of moral accountability to Robovie for the harm that Robovie caused the participant by unfairly depriving the participant of the $20.00 prize money that the participant had won. …We found that participants held Robovie less accountable than they would a human but more accountable than they would a machine. Thus as robots gain increasing capabilities in language comprehension and production, and engage in increasingly sophisticated social interactions with people, it is likely that many people will hold a humanoid robot as partially accountable for a harm that it causes. (more at the link below)
A similar study examined if kids care about their robot “friend” being stuffed into the closet. Click on the picture below to visit this study.
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