from the always-do-what-Bender-tells-you-to-do dept.
Strange Discovery Suggests Children Trust Robots Over Humans
From The Iron Giant to Big Hero 6, many of us will be familiar with tales of kids befriending robots, which suggest generations of young children are more trusting of advice from machines than their own flesh and blood.
An international research team has now found it's not just in fiction. In a study involving 111 kids aged between 3 and 6 years old, the youngsters showed a preference for believing robots more and being more accepting when robots made mistakes.
[....] The kids were split up into different groups and shown videos of robots and humans labeling objects – some objects the children would already recognize, as well as new objects they wouldn't know the names of.
Human and robot reliability was demonstrated by giving familiar objects incorrect name, calling a plate a spoon for example. In this way the researchers could manipulate the children's sense of who to trust.
Where both humans and robots were shown to be equally reliable, the youngsters were more likely to want to ask robots the names of new objects and accept their labels as accurate. What's more, the children were more likely to favor robots when asked about who they would share secrets with, who they would want to be friends with, and who they would want to have as teachers.
"Children's conceptualizations of the agents making a mistake also differed, such that an unreliable human was selected as doing things on purpose, but not an unreliable robot," write the researchers.
"These findings suggest that children's perceptions of a robot's reliability are separate from their evaluation of its desirability as a social interaction partner and its perceived agency."
[....] One area where this research might be useful is in education, especially in a world where kids are increasingly surrounded by technology.
When I was a kid, I remember the Lost In Space robot saying "Machines are trustworthy". A bit of googling shows that I correctly remembered this important lesson.
(Score: 5, Touché) by broggyr on Tuesday June 04, @08:44PM
B is for Buy 'n' Large, your very best friend.
Taking things out of context since 1972.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday June 04, @08:58PM (5 children)
Like all humans, I was born trusting my fellow man, and slowly learned to distrust him as he proved devious and untrustworthy to naive young me.
And you know who delivered the first hard lesson in not always trusting even those closest to you? My parents, when I discovered Santa wasn't real and they had lied to me all along.
I know they meant well and I know they thought it was a cute tradition, but the day I discovered they took me for a fool all along is still seared in my memory.
There was no robots when I was a kid, but I can very well picture trusting one more than I trusted my parents for a while after that. I can see how the thought of putting you trust in a dumb but ultimately straight machine can be more appealing than putting it in crooked, disappointing humans.
Although I'm probably thinking of robots the way we thought about them in the past - i.e. good, benevolent hypothetical robots. The real robots of today are controlled by giant nefarious Big Data companies and are less trustworthy than a Catholic priest in a primary school.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday June 04, @10:19PM (3 children)
Exactly. Machines may make errors, but people are malicious. A machine will only do malicious things if made to do so by a malicious human.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Insightful) by vux984 on Tuesday June 04, @10:45PM (2 children)
"A machine will only do malicious things if made to do so by a malicious human."
plus
"but people are malicious"
Means that machines are going to be exactly as malicious as people.
Yet you seem to be attempting to draw some other conclusion?? I don't follow.
If anything I'd be inclined to argue machines will be more malicious than people, because on the whole, the more malicious people tend to own more of the machines.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, @01:10AM
Machines make excellent subordinates for sociopaths as they have no conscience. They also provide plausible deniability for doing bad things.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Wednesday June 05, @06:40AM
It all depends on who has control of the machine, and how well one can vett it. I have no fear that my CNC mills will do anything malicious, but I don't trust my Windows based computer.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 05, @12:06AM
I first broke my son's trust when he was 2.5 years ago. Some quack convinced us as young parents that cod liver oil was beneficial for brain development and mitigation of autistic symptoms... He happily took the spoonful of lemon scented oil from us, and never really trusted us again...
Of course, treacherous robots are just as easy to make as trustworthy ones...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Tuesday June 04, @11:10PM (2 children)
Machines are only as trustworthy as the people who make and run them. These days, that means every last sound, motion, and action is sent back to their mothership in China, recorded forever, coordinated with the same information from every other device, fed in to an AI to determine the optimal amount of product placement, propaganda, ways to trick them in to handing over more information, and sell cell phones. Meanwhile the administrator running them is siphoning out video to deepfake. And thanks to a pile of security flaws caused by American MBAs, who only know how to smoke crack and bang hookers, outsourcing all coding to drooling hovel dwelling Indians for the fewest peanuts possible, the entire thing has been powned by someone in Hackhackgackistan, sending out malware, weaponizing components, and taking their share of the admin's goodies.
"I'M JUST AN INNOCENT CUTE LITTLE LOST ROBOT" my ass.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RedGreen on Wednesday June 05, @01:07AM
Well quite the posting, I get the feeling you are holding back. Come on tells us how you really feel...
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday June 05, @02:57AM
You referred to an American MBA.
My experience has been the MBA will quickly destroy any company that invites it in, by rapidly converting the company's assets to him and his cronies personal assets
Not saying ALL MBA does this, but people with the inclination to "earn a fast lucrative income for their family" will learn these techniques to reap a lot of personal gain at the expense of everyone else. A "Tragedy of the Commons" thing.
The founders of a company built the company, but the ones who buy a pre-existing company often have no idea of how it works...it's just a cash cow to be slaughtered.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Rich26189 on Wednesday June 05, @01:07AM (1 child)
I tobaR
Yeah, I'm that old.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday June 05, @01:33AM
My Arduinos are the only machines that I would trust with my life. As long as no-one else can physically mess with it. It astounds me on how trivial businesses treat machine loyalty, instead outsourcing out the stewardship of the corporate family to others who have little at risk.
After trying to read business T&C, I completely lose trust. It's just a list of things they may do to me, and it's a lot cheaper to cut corners and hire lawyers than it is to do the job right.
I simply do not trust machines ( or a weapon ) controlled by other people.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 05, @02:57AM
Seriously though, most kids probably have had their trust betrayed by humans for many years already.
So once they get fooled enough by robots, they'd trust robots less.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday June 05, @03:50AM
"Why?", I wonder as I type into my handheld communication robot, while I sit alone at lunch, surrounded by other people staring at their robots
(Score: 4, Insightful) by r_a_trip on Wednesday June 05, @11:14AM (2 children)
I don't think it is a weird thing to trust machines more. People are erratic, emotionally unstable critters. Most people aren't equipped to interact with children the right way. Or adults for that matter.
Machines have no emotions. They don't have off days. They don't hold grudges. Bar malfunctions, they are reliably there and they do what you ask of them. Errors are in most cases oversights in the programming/engineering.
Humans can be cold, distant, irate, mean, manipulative, abusive, deceitful, vindictive, etc. Sharing secrets with a machine (being unaware that a machine can be abused for spying) feels safer. A machine won't stab you in the back with what you divulged. Humans on the other hand mostly can't help themselves when they want to inflict pain and they have some ammunition given to them in confidence.
Adult humans erroneously labeling a plate a spoon is either a sign of being completely disconnected and absent minded or having an agenda. The researchers make one huge mistake here. By trying to establish that machines and humans are equally reliable, they forget that their test subjects already know humans very well and see through the clumsy attempt to create equivalence, hence labeling the humans unable to tell a plate from a spoon as most likely deceitful.
Anyone who has ever run afoul of their parents preconceived notions about their offspring knows that the fantasy between the ears of the parent is more important than the reality of who their children really are. Confiding in caregivers like that is a recipe for disaster.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 05, @12:36PM (1 child)
Machines (including robots) are made and operated by people.
Unless you have a very unusual degree of control over the software in your robot (and the input data that software uses) your robot is going to be heavily influenced by the same capitalists who use every trick and scheme they can get away with to maximize their profits at your expense.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by r_a_trip on Wednesday June 05, @08:44PM
That is why I mentioned the possibility of abuse of a system for spying. Nothing coming from FAANG/MAMAA can be trusted. Their bread and butter is data mining and selling you to the highest bidder.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Thursday June 06, @01:39PM
"Children's conceptualizations of the agents making a mistake also differed, such that an unreliable human was selected as doing things on purpose, but not an unreliable robot," write the researchers.
"These findings suggest that children's perceptions of a robot's reliability are separate from their evaluation of its desirability as a social interaction partner and its perceived agency."
Bullshit. The kids, being 3 to 6 years old, had not yet reached the "age of reason". The "conceptualizations" and "perceptions" attributed to the children are merely projections of the researcher's foregone conclusions.
https://www.scholastic.com/parents/family-life/social-emotional-learning/development-milestones/age-reason.html [scholastic.com]