Children Torment Robots in Japanese Human/Robot Interaction Experiment

[Yazata]

Here's something that I've observed myself.

Japanese researchers programmed a robot to move through a crowded shopping mall, then watched to see how people responded to it. If the robot's path was obstructed, it asked politely in Japanese. "May I please pass?"

When the robot encountered adults, the humans politely moved aside and allowed the robot to roll through, as if it was human.

But unsupervised children were entirely different, especially when they were in groups.

They would tell the robot "No!" and intentionally step into its path. When the robot turned away from the child in its path and tried to go in another direction, other kids in the group would block the new path, shouting 'No!".

Then they started insulting the robot, calling it stupid, and eventually started hitting and bashing it.

(It probably shouldn't be surprising to anyone who is familiar with children, they can be sadistic little monsters before they are socialized. But it's still definitely one for the child psychologists.)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...g-up-robot

http://www.rikou.ryukoku.ac.jp/~nomura/d...15LBR2.pdf

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...o-a-closet

I saw kids behaving the same way at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto which was host to a robot technology demonstration last year. Kids would block the robots' path to make them stop, would push on the robots to confuse them, and just tormented the crap out of the poor mechanical things.

The engineers in Japan decided that the best way to program a robot to move through a crowd of humans was for it to avoid groups of humans shorter than four feet tall and if confronted by the little devils, to seek out the protection of taller humans.

[C C]

[...] I saw kids behaving the same way at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto which was host to a robot technology demonstration last year. Kids would block the robots' path to make them stop, would push on the robots to confuse them, and just tormented the crap out of the poor mechanical things.

The engineers in Japan decided that the best way to program a robot to move through a crowd of humans was for it to avoid groups of humans shorter than four feet tall and if confronted by the little devils, to seek out the protection of taller humans.

When that kind of "profiling" by programmers becomes more well-known, no doubt discarded circuit-boards will hit the fan across the Pacific. The generic nature of "below four foot tall" features the collateral damage of robot discrimination against dwarves slash "adults of short stature". Of reacting to each as if a concrete member of a negative stereotype.

Apparently the issue of children being "profile maligned" must await a future when (now) litigation motivated and political career-advancing cultural re-designing propaganda becomes clever enough to figure out how to exploit last frontiers like that (i.e., of children being deemed irresponsible, bullying, irrational, naive, vulnerable, etc).

[stryder]

I did consider a similar quandary in regards to selfdrive/AI cars.  What I wanted to do was see if I could "Robot Rustle".

Namely by standing in a road and approaching an automated vehicle the question was whether it would just sit there waiting for me to move out of the way or attempt a different approach.  If the point that was picked for the experiment had a low loading trailer with a ramp at each end, I wondered if it would be possible to trick the car to drive onto the trail where it could then be trapped.  I could then ride off into the sunset with the selfdrive car intow on the trailer, never to be seen again...

well to be honest I'd probably just ride up to the Headquarters of who was developing and drop it off to show that it could easily be pilfered.

I didn't of course get around to trying it though, mainly because companies involved in such tests might not of seen the humour in it.

But it definitely generates a concern about how Automated selfdrive cars could be prone to highway robbery/Jackings.  (Such as a couple of gunman blocking its path etc)